A tactic that I suspect would be useful is the ability to call out specific things—"Yeah, a bunch of this stuff is arguable and murky, but that thing you said right there is wrong and I can prove it; I will stake a chunk of my reputation on this, and we will litigate the issue, and if I'm successful, it should damage your reputation and boost mine"—combined with people expecting to be in the system for long enough that reputations are worthwhile. ("Wrong" will include "factually wrong" and might also include "against the rules of this system"—it might be sensible to have rules about claims needing to be backed up by certain kinds of evidence.)
I think at least some parts of academia were supposed to work something like this, and maybe a few parts of it actually do.
This seems at least like the type of experiment that would be worth trying.
Also, it will be interesting is which "news" outlets label this as riots and which label it as protests.
Reflecting the same joke for Fox News is left as an exercise to the reader.
Anything can be made more inflammatory if you remove key details while still remaining factually correct.
- Tim punched Bob
- Bob punched Tim
- Bob and Tim shake hands
Reported as...
- Bob punched Tim
Factually correct but lacking context. Unless the reader knows the entire story be putting it together from multiple reports, this will create a skewed view of any report. This happens all the time with headline circulation where nobody reads the article.
If you’ve ever seen reporting or articles on something where you have deep expertise, you’ll spot it immediately because you know exactly what’s been left out. Nobody else does though.
And honestly, I have no idea what to do about it unless somebody can create a site to aggregate news from multiple sources to highlight what’s missing from each one.