> Here's a hot take: you shouldn't be trusting intenet comments written by humans anyway.

I remember an old New Yorker cartoon from the 90s that says 'On the internet, no one knows you're a dog'. Lying has been a fundamental feature of the medium since the beginning. Most of the history of the internet pre-smartphone is people trying to figure out how to combat trolls and spammers. It appears that we are having to learn the same lessons all over again.

There seems to be a kind of collective amnesia about the fact that the majority of content on the internet is written by people that are trying to sell you something, trying to get your attention for their own amusement, or are batshit insane. Frequently it's more than one of these things.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) depicts a galaxy of countless highly advanced civilizations in the far future - and describes its "net" as "the net of a million lies". However, it also depicts every message with an AI's best judgement of its reliability - for example:

>From: Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo [A known military corporation of the High Beyond. If this is a masquerade, somebody is living dangerously.]

More examples here: https://hur.st/afutd.html (spoilers if you read more than the From lines)

That's a very 20th century view of propaganda. Modern propaganda doesn't need to be factually incorrect to be effective, it just needs to direct the attention of the audience in a manner that suits the propagandist. You can push pretty much any agenda in a very convincing manner simply by choosing to emphasise or de-emphasise certain facts; we are in many ways more powerfully influenced by what we consider to be important than what we believe to be true.

If you only read reports of vaccine-related harms, it's easy to come to the conclusion that vaccines are a terrible mistake or even a conspiracy, because human brains aren't very good at prioritising the singular fact that vaccines have saved millions of lives over a constant stream of emotive stories. If you only read about the inconsistencies and errors in contemporary reports of the Holocaust, it's easy to come to the conclusion that the whole thing is exaggerated or an outright hoax, because it's just deeply unpleasant to think about six million corpses.

I don't need to lie to you or dictate what you believe, I just need to influence what you pay attention to; if I control your attention, I can guide you towards a conclusion and make you believe that you came to it of your own initiative.

The trouble is, that definition of "modern propaganda" desacribes the entire press. For example, take the FBI's use of the latest mass shootings to push for encryption backdoors - those shootings make up a tiny proportion of deaths, but we prioritize emotive stories that get large amounts of press. This has also lead to some terribly ill-conceived gun control campaigns that downplay the importance of the guns most often used to murder people.

The press is a propaganda engine. Chomsky has been saying this for decades.

It seems like the same argument could equally well justify reading the entire contents of your spam folder.

FWIW I agree with your take, but practically speaking I use whatever “metadata” I can (is this a bot, is the writer a pseudoscientist, is this thread a flame war) to help deal with the fact that it’s so much cheaper to create bull%^*t than to critically evaluate an argument or idea.

My take on this would be that people will start to have their favorite bots. They will follow bots like they follow celebrities.

This is not a very practical response. Trust is not binary.