Re:Facebook, Axios and NBC Paid to Whitewash Wikipedia Pages
by mistermann on Friday March 15, 2019 @08:31AM
(#19399057)
> What you put into the public school system today will take 50+ years to feed through to the pensioners with higher voter turnout.
If people actually learn it that is.
> It takes a lot of work and is mentally draining to check everything
Very true. However, it's far less taxing to learn how to read articles critically and detect possible half-truth telling, one example being spotting where the author is using carefully chosen words to project an idea without saying it outright. In my experience most articles on the topic of politics fall into this category, so it's best to read several versions of a story from various publications and see what kind of spin each one puts on it, which facts they include/exclude, etc.
> Far better to stop the falsehoods being dripped into the public sphere in the first place.
The first problem with this is, you'd first you have to get people to agree on what's false. I'd wager there's quite a bit you and I disagree on outside of whether the earth is flat, and I'm assuming you're probably a fairly reasonable person.
Secondly, taken literally this could mean (or gradually and eventually lead to a situation where) you can't print any speculative/inconclusive articles, and could only publish things that have been "proven" by "respectable", "right-thinking" organizations.
If people actually learn it that is.
> It takes a lot of work and is mentally draining to check everything
Very true. However, it's far less taxing to learn how to read articles critically and detect possible half-truth telling, one example being spotting where the author is using carefully chosen words to project an idea without saying it outright. In my experience most articles on the topic of politics fall into this category, so it's best to read several versions of a story from various publications and see what kind of spin each one puts on it, which facts they include/exclude, etc.
> Far better to stop the falsehoods being dripped into the public sphere in the first place.
The first problem with this is, you'd first you have to get people to agree on what's false. I'd wager there's quite a bit you and I disagree on outside of whether the earth is flat, and I'm assuming you're probably a fairly reasonable person.
Secondly, taken literally this could mean (or gradually and eventually lead to a situation where) you can't print any speculative/inconclusive articles, and could only publish things that have been "proven" by "respectable", "right-thinking" organizations.