I'm not sure where you got the impression that I wanted people to clean up misinformation from the web. That certainly wasn't my intent.

Perhaps you and I move in different social circles - but I get a lot of forwarded "claims" on WhatsApp and Twitter. Well-meaning people who see an image with some text on it and send it to their friends & family.

My blog post is mostly aimed at them - showing how easy it can be to check sources.

I find much of that sort of instant messaging communication is less about informing others and is more about social signalling. The sender is asking for emotional support and social solidarity.

What are you basing that on?

My understanding is that text messaging is rarely used for knowledge sharing, and is primarily used for social bonding[0]. In my own experience, I never receive such messages from individuals that aren't aware that I already agree with their intended interpretation.

0: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221270858_A_large_s...

Sorry, maybe I am burned on that already, but that is what I often hear when people bring up misinformation. That is the feedback legislators often give on that topic.

Certainly a good idea to search for some background. I think the velocity of social media might encourage people to skip that step, made the mistake myself too. People want to be the first to share this "hot" news with their peers.

I think reducing expectations of users towards content on the net could help as educational measure. Treat it as false until you know better yourself.

Searching and (mostly) debunking the things my mom forwards me has been a long time hobby of mine. Snopes has made my job so much easier, now I can just hit reply and paste the Snopes link back to her.

The internet is filled with so much easily accessible information, it's incredible, but you need the basic skills to determine what claims to believe in order to make any sense of it.

Now if only my family could believe Snopes. They are too set in their thoughts to believe not everything is some conspiracy theory.

Now when I debunk stuff off Facebook they continue to disagree with me because I don't have "all the facts", not like they do either.

Sometimes a simple thing is just too simple for them, those coin shortages really are some sort of mass government takeover and not just caused by people not paying with coins as much & places being shutdown and less likely to redistribute coins back into the economy. sigh

... Now for my actual rant.. While I feel pointless I like to show for contrast.

Now if I actually bring up the attorney general for the US state of Oregon suing the Feds for actually kidnapping people eh... That's apparently not an interesting story and protesters or rioters in their eyes deserve it. I understand I don't know the whole story, but I think there is something there to follow.

As someone said to me recently, this is basically Vietnam story wise. Extremes on both sides.

Lol, my URL links, despite not thinking it helps much because I start off with the bias thinking this is wrong, because of the many different videos across the country showing protesters are not all rioters. And the freedom to protest is a right in my eyes. Violence begets violence begets violence begets violence.

And yes, I know Obama signed this into law so legally the Feds have the right to randomly nap you but I still think it's a very questionable law.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/president-obama-signs-in...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6997452-Markpettibon...

https://twitter.com/stoggrd/status/1282432033533210625?s=20

https://twitter.com/TrumpIsApandemc/status/12847377794239037...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53460495

They need to understand that Snopes is not an authoritative source on its own. It provides links to other sources that provide information about the claim.

People also need to understand that those links are also not authoritative, and that what links are provided (and ones that are not) are a result of human choice, and humans are known to be fallible in many different ways.

The majority of “misinformation” I’ve seen (entirely on reddit) isn’t straight up lies. It’s more like reposting an old article on a current topic or leaving out information.

When Harvard announced remote class plans, Reddit had a front page article on r/all about it - but it was an article that was a month old about their old plan.

It would be so easy for people to read that title (old info), have their friend ask if they saw the news about Harvard, and then have basically been manipulated by misinformation.

Well, that's a bit broad interpretation of 'manipulated'.

If someone legitimately didn't know that there was more recent information, and made that post, it would be reasonable to post the more up to date info in whatever way makes it most helpful.

Any information you get from anywhere but your own senses needs to be checked in proportion to its timeliness, relevance, sources, bias, all the usual.

It's only that the current Internet speed has so much potentially coming at you that makes it a more complicated triage plan.

So like the classic game of "telephone", but amplified by a million by the Internet.

You make a good point, in that this is likely the source of even more disinformation than deliberately placed "fake news".

> The majority of “misinformation” I’ve seen (entirely on reddit) isn’t straight up lies. It’s more like reposting an old article on a current topic or leaving out information.

IIRC, that's a key tactic for spreading disinformation. It's most disruptive when it contains 1% truth and 99% lies than when it's 100% lies.

Take PizzaGate for instance: the pizza parlor in question exists, has a lot of connections to various politicians, and was directly talked about in the leaked Podesta emails. Those facts add a little bit of believability that makes it easier to suck people into the big lie.

It is even more insidious when it include 90% Truth, omitting a critical 10%.

I feel that the whole misinformation thing is overblown too. Like you, I do not have a facebook account, so maybe our s/n ratio is better than most.

I used to get a lot of chain emails that had misleading or exaggerated information. I suspect that channel dried up and moved to facebook.

That would make sense for anyone who doesn’t think democracy is worth preserving, or doesn’t know the dependency it has on the degree to which citizens are informed. Brandolini’s Law implies that there is a latency between disinformation and its disinfection via sunlight that can be exploited to tip elections. Some of us aren’t so eager to see the whole world turn into a collection of authoritarian mafia states.

That conclusion is reaching and in my opinion can become anti-democratic as well.

You don't get informed citizens through content control, you get them through education and being critical. It isn't a huge leap to suggest information should be distrusted by default.

The problem with authority on truth is almost obvious. So there is just the alternative to educate your fellow citizens in the hope that they don't fall for populism.

Otherwise you don't just have people trying to manipulate the public against you and instead those that like freedom of opinion and information. Both are hard requirements for democracy.

Also anti-democratic can be to conjure at threat that can only be defeated through x, in this case stricter content control.

> Doesn't mean I want a babysitter cleaning everything up, even if I thought they wouldn't just want to suppress dissidents.

No, but it is critical that we start educating our citizens to the point where they no longer need babysitters to evaluate truth claims for them, but can do basic research and fact checking on their own.