Somehow, the National Enquirer existed for decades alongside the newspapers of record in every town of the United States, and we didn't degenerate into a know-nothing lawless society. Tastes changed, and though correlation is not causation, the slippage of America's educational performance comparative to other countries' can't be flat out ignored.

This example doesn't survive even a shallow consideration.

The National Enquirer isn't piped into our smartphones all day long, mixed in with notes from friends, repeated on local TV news stations, and broadcast over FM radio. They've never put the money into figuring out how to manipulate people into consuming their content as often as possible.

As the whole anti-vaccination problem has clearly shown, people aren't equipped to sort out fact from fiction all on their own, despite (or maybe because of...) living in the most information-rich society in human history.

However, a large enough group of ill-informed people is sufficient to force social change or even incite violence and stoke the fires of xenophobic hatred. So it is a problem that needs to be addressed; it's wrong and morally lazy for intellectuals to lean back and say, "well, free speech, and people will sort themselves out anyway." There is an imperative here to resolve this new problem our society has.

Right. Everyone knew the National Enquirer was junk. But big cable news companies are big cable news companies. You trust them. Your local news anchors, you've watched them your whole life. You trust them. You trust your mom and your preacher and your coworkers, so when they tell you something, your guard is lowered.

All the time Facebook shows me "[My mother] likes [News Outlet]" and then shows me stories from that news outlet. That is a recommendation from my mom, or at least Facebook would have you believe so.

It's kind of like, trust-hijacking, isn't it. The news outlet uses your mom's auth token to get access to your brain's API endpoint!

I like that. Trust-hijacking. It sums up what "influencers" have been used for since the dawn of social media.

I can't read your comment without hearing faint echoes of extremist clerics telling me how the world today is "saturated with porn", which in turn is responsible for "widespread sexual immorality" and "gender confusion" in your comments.

We all perceive the world through the echoes in our heads, I suppose.

None of those things were implied in my comment, or a subtext in it, or a conscious or subconscious component of it, or even statements I would typically agree with.

But, if you prefer to approach this from, "this guy disagreed with me and said something I don't like, so I bet that means he likes other things I don't like, so I'm going to accuse him of that", then ... well, okay. Go on dismissing the modern problems with widespread misinformation as exactly comparable to the National Enquirer, I suppose.

Other people are having a more serious discussion about the subject though and you'll be missing out.

The thing is, being well informed on vaccinations tells you that there are real risks. While on a societal level the risks are clearly well worth the outcome but at an individual level are they? For instance, if 1 in 100 will be harmed, 98 get the vaccine and are fine, 1 is harmed and the other forgoes the vaccine with zero risk from the vaccine and near zero risk of contracting the target of the vaccination.

It took just 32 minutes for someone to show up and demonstrate my example of vaccinations and false information. Good job, HN.

1) Your probably take your nickname for granted at this point, but it's a little rich for a user named 'thaumaturgy' to (implicitly) accuse others of magical thinking. :)

2) How exactly did 'Varcht' demonstrate that "people aren't equipped to sort out fact from fiction"? Do you disagree that vaccines have both benefits and risks? I thought he made a good point.

This is not the time nor thread for a debate on the merits of vaccination, and I'm not in a good enough mood for it right now anyway. If someone honestly believes that 1 in 100 people is going to be harmed by a vaccine, and that the number harmed by refusing vaccinations is less than 1 in 100, then there's probably nothing I could say nor any literature I could cite which would change their mind.

OK, but I think your "mood" may have caused you to lash out at an innocent bystander. 'Varcht' prefaces his comment with "While on a societal level the risks are clearly well worth the outcome", which implies that he agrees that the number who benefit is greater than the number who are harmed. Instead, he's raising the subtler (and I think reasonable) issue of whether despite the societal benefit there may be individuals within the population for whom the risk/reward ratio is reversed. If your goal is persuasion, I think it's better to engage rather than resorting to sarcastic responses of "Good job, HN". Your comments are usually excellent, but I thought this one fell short.

> Instead, he's raising the subtler (and I think reasonable) issue of whether despite the societal benefit there may be individuals within the population for whom the risk/reward ratio is reversed.

FWIW, this is a variant of a debate tactic known as "just asking questions" (on rationalwiki) or the "loaded question" (wikipedia). I won't accuse ~Varcht of doing this intentionally, because I don't know them well enough to assume bad faith, but the end result is the same: the question, appearing innocent enough, is based on false premises and derails the conversation.

It's especially common coming from people who have been misinformed on some controversial subject and have developed vague doubts towards established science on that subject, but don't have a sufficient library of information at-hand to argue directly. Instead, they just try to raise the same doubts in others. Their conversations follow the form, "Okay, but what if...?"

It works because people in civilized forums don't want to be seen as unkind towards people asking innocent-looking questions. For instance, here we are being distracted by ~Varcht's 1-in-100 question, but the patently false statement they started with is being ignored.

To bring this back to the subject of the thread, ~Varcht unintentionally -- I assume -- made themselves an excellent example of a victim of the modern problems of misinformation. I would wager that they don't regularly read the National Enquirer, and probably wouldn't believe most or any of the stuff in one, but here they are to raise the spectre of the dangers of vaccination -- a popular belief, I would add, that kills people, especially young children.

So that we don't let ourselves become too emotionally detached from the consequences people suffer from this pandemic of misinformation, here's a reminder of what infant whooping cough looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3oZrMGDMMw

> If your goal is persuasion, I think it's better to engage rather than resorting to sarcastic responses of "Good job, HN".

Sometimes persuasion is a reasonable goal. Other times, bad ideas should be mercilessly mocked before they have an opportunity to germinate in fertile ground. You were around here then, do you remember what HN's attitude towards established science was shortly after the CRU email compromise?

But yeah, I could've left that last part off.

But I can't -- and shouldn't -- be dispassionate all the time, either.

> Your comments are usually excellent, but I thought this one fell short.

Thanks, and fair 'nuff.

I mean, there's a long precedent of restricting free speech in the public interest. The classic example of shouting fire in a public theater comes to mind: the speech causes imminent danger to the theater occupants, and the courts have ruled that the rights of the public to safety outweigh the rights of the individual to say whatever they'd like.

The question with fake news becomes: what is the damage that this type of speech causes to the public? This is a really difficult question to answer, especially since we're only starting to notice the effects on our political system. If this damage is too great, there would be justification to restrict it in the public interest.

Of course, the people who end up making these determinations may also have conflicting political incentives, which makes this a very delicate situation to tackle in as broken of a political environment as we have in the US.

The "fire in a crowded theater" example comes from a court case that allowed the government to imprison somebody for advocating against the draft, and it's been used to defend government overreach ever since[1].

What's interesting is how the same argument for allowing more discrimination would be laughed off the stage as completely meritless and bigoted. But the situation is exactly the same! Organizations are allowed to discriminate against protected classes when it's a bona fide occupational qualification or the organization is a private club, so surely there's long precedent for allowing discrimination in specified circumstances?

Somehow almost everyone sees how this argument is totaly facile in the context of discrimination, yet it gets trotted out over and over when suggesting further restrictions on freedom of speech.

[1]: https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

> The "fire in a crowded theater" example comes from a court case that allowed the government to imprison somebody for advocating against the draft, and it's been used to defend government overreach ever since[1].

good grief... you should shout this from the rafters. thanks for sharing.

> Of course, the people who end up making these determinations may also have conflicting political incentives, which makes this a very delicate situation to tackle in as broken of a political environment as we have in the US.

Or in other words, I hope people realise it could well be their political enemies that decide what's classed as fake news and what isn't. Wonder how many people would change their mind about backing a crackdown on the concept if they realised it could be the current administration making the decision?

Being able to physically run your mouth in public has little to do with free speech, including shouting fire in a movie theatre.

Free speech is the ability to express any opinion or idea, anti-government opinions included. This is why online posts and various non-verbal actions (like burning a flag) are protected under The First Amendment, even though nothing is being physically said. Additionally this is why threatening violence towards somebody isn’t protected: a threat of violence isn’t an opinion or an idea.

The first amendment protects you from the American government. Private entities can block what they want.

Your first amendment rights were not violated if Facebook censors you.

There are cases where the First Amendment can apply to "private-owned public spaces", such as company towns [0] or shopping malls [1]. While such a designation has not yet been applied to Facebook, some are exploring the possibility of doing so [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

[1] https://firstamendmentcoalition.org/2010/08/free-speech-cali...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-11-29/how-to-ta...

Never made that claim but thanks for the info.

There needs to be a substantial governmental reason to restrict any liberties granted in the constitution.

For example, guns are not allowed in post offices for a substantial governmental reason.

I agree with your second point. Who controls what's considered fake news? Very little is done in the interest of the citizens of the USA anymore [1], so why would we trust our government or media to show us what's in our best interest?

[1] https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig (Fully Sourced in Description)

> Liars gonna lie

Agreed. As they always have since humans or our ancestors first stood to gain from deception. You'll never stop it.

But I think the solution may still come from market forces. Not as in tech companies inventing showy systems for flagging and muting fake news. But I think people are slowly becoming smarter news consumers, more skeptical about what they take as fact. Who hasn’t become smarter about filtering out BS in the last two years?

The problem for Trump and Fox with all their “fake news” tirades is that you can’t partially open people’s minds to skepticism. Once they begin questioning one news source, they begin developing general critical reasoning ability. Tribalism may keep them defending their bad news source for some time, but as they continue to tear apart other sources, they will become increasingly unable to turn a blind eye to their own. In the long run, Fox making accusations of fake news will cannibalize their own fake news. Whether that happens in the next 8 years or on a longer horizon? Who knows…

> Once they begin questioning one news source, they begin developing general critical reasoning ability.

I think this is being very generous to the idea of skepticism. Skepticism is a very difficult thing to learn properly, and more or less being a skeptic of modern media seems to be more heavily related to dismissing any information which contradicts you own paradigm of the world in favor of a more simplistic model that works for you. Dismissing all media except for "the one true source" is really no better than exposing yourself to all of it and believing it blindly. It's just substituting one absolute truth for another. I honestly don't think that what Fox does will cannibalize their own bad reporting; it will only strengthen it, because unless one is actively seeking to question the truths they hold dear, they will never really take the time to validate what they already "know". It's a very humbling thing to accept that what you know may be based on bad information, and to live in a constant fantasy since it's more convenient.

I hope we will grow past this, but right now we're still working on learning to sort the vast amount of information we're exposed to daily.

> I think people are slowly becoming smarter news consumers, more skeptical about what they take as fact

They really, really, really aren't. Look at the polls.

> Once they begin questioning one news source, they begin developing general critical reasoning ability

They don't question news sources. They write off anything that doesn't contribute to their happy little world (or very unhappy little world, whichever).

I don't think Fox News is awakening people to skepticism; I think Fox News is convincing many people that only Fox News can be trusted.

> The market favors clickbait, not necessarily truth.

This seems super related to the lack of a decent way to pay for one-off articles and the need to show ads. If there were a medium between adware and a $10/month subscription, I firmly believe the articles would bulk up again. Gaming for page views necessarily trends towards zero content per page view. Competing for money itself would lead to some sort of qualitative difference in content--a huge win for consumers.

I understand your point, but in times of crisis, (like the Myanmar situation) I think the idea of no solution won't find much takers and people will be desperate to "do something".

so, create a crisis like 'russian meddling' to do the same here, you are saying?

Want to expand on what you mean by "create a crisis" in relation to Russian meddling?

I would argue that the degree to which we value honesty and truth has slipped a lot in the last decade, or at least it has done in our epistemological institutions (journalism, academia, etc). I think it may be caused by ideological homogeneity (the folks who might call a social scientist on their ideological bias are too marginalized to matter). This is fortunately a tractable problem with a clear solution: promote viewpoint diversity.

> I basically think there's no solution.

Which is unfortunate given that Democracy works a whole lot better with a (correctly) informed public.

I'm surprised nobody has thought about putting more money into education.

I think there is a point of diminishing returns, and with our current educational system design, we're at that point.

Without a redesign of some core parts of the system, no amount of money can be thrown at the problem to solve this issue.

The market isn’t static, it’s dynamic. The plethora of news sources will over time force consumers to think more critically about their information, since there is an inherent desire to not be a fool. The current situation is a temporary chaos before society renormalizes to the new conditions. It’s like the first few seconds of chaos when you mix red and blue water, before it settles to a calm purple.

This is what happens when there are only major two political parties. After contributions to the right candidates on each side of the aisle, money left over to stand up astro turf political parties, buy TV stations, newspapers, and magazines. Plus they get it all back in tax breaks and approved contracts.

> Liars gonna lie.

And stupid people will continue to be stupid.

> I basically think there's no solution.

Agreed.

Spend more on education and less on war. There's one solution.

It’s not clear that throwing money at the problem will fix it. I don’t know if critical thinking is even really taught in school.

I think John Dewey had the right idea. A well educated populace is necessary. But, public education is a mess right now.