The system is stuck in two local maximums: news publishers which use their own web properties as some kind of newspaper/television hybrid, and social media platforms which conceive of media as only posts, votes, & comments. They're both "monolithic architectures" (so to speak) which lack the kind of modularity or extensibility that would enable innovation.
On the Internet, we should be looking at information within the context of general computation. There are data sources (reporters, individuals, orgs) which get mixed with signals (votes, fact-checks, annotations) and then ranked, filtered, and rendered. An open market would maximize the modularity and extensibility of each of these components so that better media products can be created.
The social platforms are in a difficult position because they have total control over what's carried on their platforms, and so they want to assert a position of neutrality -- which is why they're adamant they're not media companies. But if they're controlling any part of the pipeline other than compute and hosting, they're not a neutral platform. They're a part of the media.
The way we've historically walked the tight-rope of misinformation vs censorship is to create an open market for journalism so that there's accountability through the system. I don't think we'll have an open market until we componentize social media and stop seeing journalism and the design of social media as two distinct things.
It's always surprising to me to see tech folks disparage humanities studies, then seem flabbergasted at how to fight problems like disinformation/misinformation. IMO, studying language, literature, and criticism are critical skills for operating in a culture that is flooded with information.
In terms of what we can do right now... I've been following Mike Caulfield on Twitter (@holden) and he is doing some interesting work on developing mental tools that school kids can use to evaluate the information that comes to them in social feeds.
I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. It is documented that textbook manufacturers publish different history and science texts based on the region of the country regarding the civil war or evolution.
Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way?
I also think critical thinking is VERY hard. Harder than people imagine. It is hard to teach, hard to deploy, hard to practice. I'm not sure even 20% of the population could muster the brain power required to sift through today's onslaught of zone-flooding garbage.
That's fair, it's certainly one of many hurdles that this sort of a solution would have to face.
Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way?
Well I'd probably answer that by starting out with an inquiry on how nihilism is a factor in what is a completely valid question about implementation? A school's ability to fund this kind of program from textbooks to technology to training staff and instructors has to be considered, this type of educational program doesn't happen in vacuum.
So I'd say you're right to ask questions about the disparity in school funding and how it would affect a media literacy curriculum-even if I'm not sure it's particularly accurate to describe such questions as "nihilist", they're completely necessary. But by no means am I intending to make any sort of value judgement about how successful this school or that school will be by merely suggesting taking a stab at introducing media literacy into public schooling.
To the questions of publishers, excellent question again. Maybe there are some models already out there worth exploring and iterating upon to maximize the value across the various school systems and school models (public, montessori, et al), a few people have commented that there are comparable programs where they live, I'd be curious to see if there are systems worth replicating in this thought experiment.
I think you raise excellent points here, all things said.
And from the children's side: It's already extremely hard to teach kids anything at a deeper level, especially those ones who will later on become susceptible to misinformation. If I look at my Facebook feed, schoolmates who got bad grades around age 10 are the ones sharing fake quiz results, horoscope stuff, "you won't believe what THIS person..." articles, listicles, racist stuff etc. Sure it's just correlational, but I think we don't have much better ways than we currently do in school.
If we could go back in time and design some critical thinking curriculum, are you sure you could teach something useful to those struggling 10-year-olds, that would keep their adult selves away from Internet bullshit?
Yes. That's why I made the suggestion to begin this thread with. What those 10-year-olds who grow-up to become adults (as we all do) do with that information is impossible to ever truly know, but I think something of value could be taught, yes, absolutely.
But I disagree that funding is a red-herring, no it's not solely about the money, but as I said: curriculum implementation does not happen in a vacuum. It's relevant, and I don't see many useful discussions about implementation specifically happening without it. If there's a discussion to be had about the ethics or merits of media literacy, sure money probably doesn't carry as much weight--but I'm trying to speak as broadly as possible on the topic to avoid the trappings of turtles-all-the-way-down kvetching about the stylistics over how the discussion is framed.
For example, we had something approximating it in Hungary, in history class. The very fist history lesson we had, was on historical sources, how historians work, "who benefits?", how you can know that a coin saying "minted in 350 BC" must be fake etc. And then later it was all facts and gospel, no critical presentation of different possibilities and interpretations and framings. Because it would be overwhelming.
But to actually train critical thinking, all classes should be redesigned in this manner, encouraging kids to poke holes in the material, but teachers can barely venture out of the confines of the curriculum. An elementary school physics teacher won't be able to explain things to you the same way a professor could if you raise some criticism or find a plothole in the simplified lie-to-children presentation. They'll just say, "that's how it is, memorize it".
It's a very difficult problem and hardly scalable.
That said...
Reading other more recent comments though I think we're drifting a bit here and introducing some creep into my initial suggestion: critical thinking and media literacy certainly have some overlap in the types of class and even perhaps overlap in topic, but I'm unsure if I'd necessarily agree that 'media literacy' as a school topic needs to go all the way down the rabbit hole of of unpacking "critical theory" and "how to think critically" just to hold courses on what I initially and deliberately called 'media literacy and criticism'.
Your points are nonetheless well met, however-it definitely is a difficult nut to crack, and I can't help but wonder if it's a type of thing where if the immediate benefits maybe don't come from solving the problem but manifest as external results from simply looking at existing similar curricula and going from there-to maybe lower the initial hurdles of implementation that you and others spoke of? What do you think?
Perhaps tell them a story and ask them to rewrite it such that the bad guy comes out looking like the good guy and vice versa, or similar manipulations and framing exercises. To pick out manipulative phrases from presidential speeches, like peace, democracy, our great nation etc. But that would directly conflict with what they hear in other classes. Or perhaps use the example of dictatorial propaganda, text and posters alike, point out manipulative stuff.
Perhaps one interesting thing would be to peek behind the curtains. To tell them how news are made, how books are produced, how science works, what is peer review, how they can look up the original primary source (but this is too advanced for kids...). That books and knowledge and articles don't just fall out of the sky, they are deliberately produced with goals in mind.
I fear that ultimately it would devolve into a "don't believe everything you read, kids!", similar to "don't do drugs" lectures.
* How to source and read cited sources of online publications
* Copyright, fair use, associated topics (memes would be a great way to capture the attention of a middle schooler and would be a perfect tangent to these topics)
* Print and online advertising, how print markets have changed and evolved with the new digital landscape and the influence advertising and money has on content production (Youtuber's and patreons, again, a topic relevant to a young captive mind and one they're familiar with)
There's genuinely NO shortage of boilerplate contemporary lesson plans all across the internet covering "media literacy" as an applied subject matter for young minds-such that I don't really believe this to be as difficult of a teachable subject as many people commenting here are trying to make it out as being[0]
[0] https://mediaeducationlab.com/topics/Teaching-Media-Literacy
Yeah. 'Nihilist' wasn't the correct word. Perhaps fallacious was more accurate: I think the subtext of my Q was, "If you can't fix everything why even start?" Which is dangerous.
I think I was fishing for answers: how is critical thinking even taught? My only experience with school was my one pass through it. And I didn't start critically thinking until my late 20's during the Clinton administration. I remember taking a critical thinking class in college (engineering school) and just sitting there as a freshman with my mouth hanging open when called on to make a critique.
It took a degree of engagement for me to become critical about issues. But then I was one-sided, and it took literally 20 more years before I started realizing there are two sides to an argument.
Not to toot my own horn, but I was very smart and very unobjective about anything outside of tech for 4/5ths of my life.
> But by no means am I intending to make any sort of value judgement about how successful this school or that school will be by merely suggesting taking a stab at introducing media literacy into public schooling.
I don't know how many other HN'ers have the same question, but I'd really like to know: how would a teacher proceed to instill what took me 40+ years to learn (and still learning!) into a teen-aged brain?
Any teachers out there?
I don't see how you can teach the essence of critical thinking when it's in itself a fiercely individualistic don't-just-trust-the-authority idea.
If you teach it as such, you will get people to believe in any and all crackpottery because "I learned not to trust school and experts, I now found the actual truth that my school has repressed in this creationist UFO book on how aliens built the pyramids".
The other option is to teach them not to trust anything that comes from "unapproved" sources, only believe your government institutions, UN orgs etc. This may seem like a good baseline for the average person but it's just appeal to authority and not critical thinking.
I think there is just no such thing as "critical thinking" that could be taught as such, in itself. You have to go to the object level. If you want to dispel creationism, you have to teach biology and talk about how we know what we know about evolution and make sure people deeply understand it in their bones and they don't just regurgitate what they think you expect of them. It's the same in every subject. If you want people not to believe in magic healing crystal energy vibrations and parapsychology and homeopathy, you have to get them to understand some principles of real medicine and real physics (with equations and exercises all that). Only someone who has firm foundations on the object level, can successfully apply critical thinking.
One thing that could be taught though is propaganda techniques, marketing psychology, how it relates to the brain's reward systems, how ads are designed and monitored, A/B testing and tracking in cell phones, addiction. How cults form, the human biases that cult leaders use, a lot of stuff about human behavior, social psychology, trust, different personality types. Fallacies, pitfalls of thinking. But all these are very meta and again, to have a good grasp of these, you need a good actual base on the object level.
Most of actual critical thinking in the real world looks like "wait a minute, that doesn't feel right according to my model of how the world works". It's not really by matching things against a shortlist of logical fallacies that you had to memorize for some test.
That's why I'm saying that the object level is important. Teaching meta is way more difficult.
Also, as I wrote somewhere else, if I look at my Facebook feed for posts of former schoolmates, the ones who had good grades at the time and ended up in higher ed, learning about the world, they don't post fake news and clickbait and horoscopes and don't allow random apps to post in their name etc., while those who used to be struggling and couldn't learn English (as a foreign language) well etc. they do post junk.
Now there are always exceptions, like the university educated engineer who turns to build a perpetuum mobile and cries conspiracy for "getting silenced" etc. But by and large what it comes down to is having a large body of knowledge and understanding about the world. It's not particularly that their "critical thinking" skills are better. They have just read more, learned more, can use foreign language sources, generally have a better model of how the (natural and social) world works, condensed to "intuition". Simply dropping in a "critical thinking" course for kids won't make a significant effect I fear.
Crash Course (the YouTube channel) published a short series last year on Navigating Digital Information (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSK...). I really appreciated its pointers for how to deal with social media.
Still: good question!
Students who take and show competency in pre-algebra qualify to move on to higher level maths building foundational knowledge for the more complex systems.
It wouldn’t necessarily have to be 1:1 in the model and structure of classes, but that’s my thinking. Media literacy shouldn’t be a one semester course, maybe not even a one year course, but instead a component of a radically different educational framework that informs our young students how to critique, analyze and reason their way through the digital frontier.
By no means would this kind of shift in education be easy, but in my mind ease is as much a threat to progress than hardship in some cases.
It's easy to get people to question advertising, because they aren't emotionally invested. Once you stray into religion and politics, people often stop caring that they're hearing plainly untrue, or even self-contradictory, ideas.
i have developed a loose curriculum for the latter half of that pipeline, but getting the education uniformly distributed throughout the public mind market is the hard part.
If you aren't being taught critical thinking already in English, History, and Math then what are you being taught?
Isn't that the entire point of those classes?
Many people are guilty of not actually understanding why people believe what they do. They will read arguments by people on their side but won't read the best arguments made by the opposite side. They will instead read the arguments by either people who make crappy arguments or by people on their own side explaining the opposition's view. This typically results in awful, often strawmen arguments for the opponent's views.
If teachers could set up debates between students on topics I think it would be good. Ideally, the student should disagree with the side they are supposed to defend, though isn't always possible. This will force them to look up the views held by the other side. The teacher should understand the best arguments on both sides and should step in when arguments are being made incorrectly or when a student misses a good response.
This of course would often times not work well because teachers don't understand their opponent's views so I am not sure how to actually handle this. You could possibly have a teacher with a different view help moderate the debate, but there is a disproportionate amount of teachers who are liberal (I've seen some studies that put it at over 80%) so it would not always be practical.
This doesn't always work on every topic like math, but it could be helpful in both English (for meaning behind books, poems, etc) and various history topics.
I am sure there are additional ways to help students learn critical thinking but this could be a good way if teachers are actually able to present both sides in a fair way.
The poster asked what could be done. I’m at least trying to answer the question.
Do you have solutions? Share them! Let’s discuss.
Some people adopted a strategy of adding users to a group and dropping whatever message they have but that too is solved by allowing only known contacts to add you to groups.
Imagine if HN or Reddit didn't sort by popularity? Everyone would need to sort through /new. ...that's not scalable.
What would be better would be to reward controversial content. If lots of people downvote something, and also lots of people upvote, then maybe it needs more attention, not less?
So that rather than creating ever-more-extremist bubbles, people are more likely to see opinions that make them force them to appreciate other points of view.
and therein lies the problem. The issue is the scale in the first place. Twitter et al produce so much garbage because they're designed towards virality outside of any human scale.
Bring social networks down to the size that a community can coherently operate in and you've diminished the problem.
HN arranges by popularity but actually in a fairly limited way. There's no scores shown and the downvotes are capped, and most threads you can actually read through because they've got less than 200 comments or so.
Do the same for Facebook or twitter. Limit connections, hide visible upvotes or likes, cap the number of people something can be shared with by one user, make people choose who they are in contact with, which immediately puts scarcity and value on connection and communication. Obviously there is no commercial incentive for these companies to do this, who live off the entropy they generate.
Reddit gives people the choice, so you can sort by new if you want to.
Choice is good, right?
That hurts the bottom line so the social media companies won't do it unless they are forced to.
> Revert to chronological feeds based on timestamp alone
At the very least this should be an option (and not one that is automatically reset every time you view a page -- I'm looking at you facebook).
With that straw man though, it's fairly easy to poke holes. How do we ever even implement that? Even if we ignore the sheer volume of posts, a single post is often difficult to fact check. The lie can be subtle, but even worse is the human language and how much room there can be for misdirection, dishonesty, etc.
In my spare time I work on a project (not even close to release lol) with the goal of easing information sharing, retention, etc - as I figure part of the problem to the current age is a lack of information. Wikipedia is great, but it's quite large form discussion and I think we need better tools to help us document our own conclusions. BUT, even in all the effort I've put towards this tool I haven't dreamed of quantifying the truthiness.
I just don't see how we're going to cope with these sort of truth problems. It concerns me. It feels like information is a tool of war these days, and I am concerned we're losing.
In one of their episodes, they interview the CEO of YouTube about what they're doing to stop the spread of misinformation on web content platforms like their own.
Her response is that they're no longer tailoring their recommendation models or carousels based purely on engagement alone, but also based on potential harm or impact, because the common misinformation preys on being highly engaging. The biggest example of this is how YouTube is dealing with Covid-19 misinformation, that the "COVID-19 news" carousel on the home page doesn't get much engagement but is important for people to stay informed.
It's a good listen if you have the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/podcasts/rabbit-hole-yout...
Are people aware that there are two classes of users on Twitter, subject to different sets of rules? Twitter hides this fact, for some reason, but it's something that ought to be glaringly obvious to anyone viewing any of a user's tweets.
[1]: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicint...
===== The world would be a better place if Twitter did not exist. =====
Note the lack of caveat, nuance, or elaboration here. It's not conducive to making the argument in a compelling and convincing way, especially not in the ways espoused by Hacker News. People who agree with that statement are going to agree. People who don't are going to be outraged.
If you do agree with the above the real question is what to do about it. Does the problem lie with the people at Twitter? With capitalism? With democracy? With the particular implementation that is the United States? Is this just something inherent to human nature? Or is the internet to blame? There are no simple answers to these questions. But perhaps the mediums that we use to have the discussions have a substantial impact on the conversation.
The interesting thing that I think Jack Dorsey should respond directly to Trump's tweet about regulation is "I'm sorry you no longer find Twitter useful. Feel free to use a competitor's product." The main reason that the social networks haven't clamped down is that they need the eyeballs and controversial figures generate a lot on both sides (hate/love).
It's a problem that we cannot actually engage in any debate or correction. President Trump is a perfect example of this, he drops his Tweet and then, poof, he's gone. He will not respond to difficult question about freedom of speech, etc.
Trump drops his talking point and runs away, then Twitter drops their "fact check" and runs away. I don't think anyone is the better for it. Nobody's minds have been changed. Nobody has been educated or given serious thought to difficult issues. Nobody has had empathy for others. Having the "fact check" is better than not, but not much, and "fact checks" are not always correct.
If we could somehow social engineer our way to meaningful debates on these difficult topics, we would be much better off. I know the President can't respond to millions of people, but if we could, somehow, systematically choose just a few of the best counterpoints and force some dialogue, then a lot of the "bullshit" would immediately evaporate.
The easiest is to get rid of bots and control who can tweet. Anyone can create an account but to tweet you need to prove your identity. Bots are the real issue. Trump lying on social media is a problem but it's not fundamentally dissimilar to him lying on TV or at a campaign rally. He is a liar and whatever platform he is on he will use it to lie. The problem is all the bots masquerading as humans making people think and believe that the lies are mainstream facts.
Tweeting anonymously is a non-starter unless they can curtail the bot problem in some other way. If they could curtail the bot problem then they would be doing it already and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Half the content on Twitter and Facebook is from bots. I would say this is the most fundamentally urgent problem to solve to protect Democracy in this country.
Twitter already requires a phone number, prepaid credit cards can be very cheap, and not everyone has utility bills in their names. Many people cannot get drivers licenses. These are great for privileged people, but discriminatory against unprivileged people. I don't think stifling their voices is something we need more of.
How much did this “reopen America” botnet influence national discussion? People don’t innately expect a Twitter or Facebook user to be a bot. We have to remove these bot accounts.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-dis...
Wo have given too much power to these private companies.
> how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?
...and provide constructive content please.
This it it. We did it. There is nothing for us to do, but celebrate.
After the 2016 election, there was a thought that too much false information is spreading on social media. This happens in every country and across every form of communication - but social media platforms seem particularly worrysome (and is particularly bad with Whatsapp forwards in some Asian countries).
So what should the social media companies do? Censor people? Disallow certain messages (like they do with terrorism related posts)?
They settled on just putting in fact check links with certain posts. Trust in the fact deciding institution will of course be difficult to settle. No one wants a ministry of truth (or the private alternative).
So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?