Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
When you make your age distinctions, you might be talking about people who are non-technical.
Early Internet techies predicted situations like this before they happened. (Pre-Web, we had all kinds of sci-fi predictions, awareness from historical analogues, etc. Post-Web, I talked with startup founders 20 years ago, who would also be 40yo+ by now, who predicted that their company's accounts would be used for shill identities for things like manipulation, and the implications of that.)
Passive consumers, of your under-40 group, who grew up in it never knew anything else, have had things framed for them, and are just starting to realize the situations we're now in.
My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it.
I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to 'hack anything'.
> we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.
I'm not sure kids who grew up with an iPad appliance are really more generally technically literate on average than GenXers who entertained themselves trying to write Choose You Own Adventure-type stories in BASIC on their Commodore 64s ... or who, at least, managed to get their pirated copy of Stellar 7 to run.
It used to be the GUI was basically the same as a CLI but with clicks instead of typing out "cp" "mv" etc. Now the GUI to CLI relationship is severed. You have an iPhone and the GUI it runs is basically running on top of the underlying CLI that apple hides from you (and you need to jailbreak the phone in order to gain access).
Imagine if Apple just gave these kids root and a terminal app, and the files app actually showed you the directory structure of the device. They could be scripting on these machines and learning about how they function same as we did growing up.
Instead, apple things we need to hold these kids hands and should learn Swift and other low code efforts instead. IMO these kids don't need an easy bake oven to learn to cook, they need a kitchen and the freedom to learn how to burn themselves like we had. Apple is afraid of letting their customers operate the stove they bought.
Did you once have a myspace page or live journal where you said very controversial things or vented angst in a manner that you'd rather your co-workers didn't see? Well sorry but all that stuff now goes into your facebook feed where it will be with you forever.
It takes real determination to stay actually anonymous on the internet today and someone trying to stumble into it is likely going to screw it up - when we millennials were growing up that personal data you accidentally leaked onto a forum (maybe during a spicy exchange of direct messages) can't follow you since that forum no longer exists - it was probably hosted on PHPBB and either an admin accidentally deleted the DB at some point or the whole server was chucked in the trash - even if someone had access to those messages it would be harder to definitively tie it back to someone since user fingerprinting was so non-existent.
That all said, I was in the middle of University when folks were learning that bong-shots on your facebook page might hurt your long term job prospects so we did get to see it start to emerge as a concern.
Unfortunately this isn’t just limited to the over 40 crowd. People are willing to believe whatever affirms their beliefs. Growing up on the Internet does not change this.
The impersonation can be more damaging than the content, because it's a variety of toxic mental pollution - a form of betrayal - that lowers the SNR of the entire Internet.
Any propaganda from more than a couple of decades ago seems immediately corny to kids.
Just go browse reddit for 10 minutes if you don't believe me. I recommend the /r/GME cult for instance, but there are many others. People will gladly listen to anybody if they tell them what they want to hear.
Young minds know how to deal with the polluted informational space and learn to get value out of it one way or another.
The informational gems that we need to hold up with high regard are examples of sincere discussion and debate between those who disagree with each other and yet have a genuine goal to hear and be heard by the counter-party, a deep reluctance to deploy rhetorical tricks, and a willingness to support controversial views if they are supported by uncontroversial fact.
for instance people insist the election was stolen, not because they literally know it to be true, but rather because the outcome, that democrats control national politics, is somehow unacceptable. a productive discussion would start here, with why that’s unacceptable, not quibbling over whether the election was actually stolen or not (it wasn’t).
also, those false projections are 99.9% of the content on twitter, facebook, etc.
One would think if it were integrated with other studies it would be mentioned somewhere other than Edutopia and Walden adverts.
I did, in a very rural, very underfunded school district - all of those things are critical thinking.
It is integrated into other studies. But there tend to not be "This lesson is critical thinking" sorts of headers on the lesson plans.
Look for the phrase "lifelong learner". That tends to be where the "critical thinking" lives for many schools.
It’s been awhile, but would wonder how unbiased today’s history books are. I can’t see the State of Texas board being nuanced about the Alamo.
I can see a rural district where teachers/schools have much more control over curricula, so enlightment or indoctrination is easier to influence. I dont see this scaling to large administrative/measurement bound districts. How does one test to CT outside perhaps secondary effects of STEM or AP results? It does appear that higher percentages of students are taking AP tests though.
Being educated by Jesuits, we started with Socrates/Plato. But looking at my classmates FB feeds I don’t see any evidence of sober CT skills. Skepticism is a synonym of conspiricism in today’s generations. Biases are polar bound.
This is news to me. What countries are you referencing?
Teaching critical thinking skills is not some revolutionary idea and it's not like educators want to avoid teaching people how to do it.
"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
Page 13: https://web.archive.org/web/20120629111643/http://s3.amazona...
Since we're just comparing anecdata at this point (or at least I am), if you have any data/studies or anything like that it would be appreciated.
People claim that critical thinking is not taught in schools because it's an easy claim to make when you perceive that so many other people are thinking uncritically. But, make a claim they disagree with and watch how good they become at it. Everyone falls into a trap of thinking that society at large lacks 'common sense' or 'critical thinking' because we all assume our worldview is true and anyone who disagrees must have deficient thinking. Ultimately I think people are taught how to think critically, but the real problem is when they choose to think critically. And that, I think, is a result of human nature, not lack of education.
I remember when I was dating a doctor being appalled by her complete inability to think through a problem, and I later learned medical school is basically mass memorization. I am obviously cherry picking medicine here, but if doctors aren't even taught that by the time they're practicing in the United States I think it's fair to say critical thinking is sorely lacking in our education system. She was a neurologist who was unable to help me with my migraines, and I later figured them out on my own using ~drumroll~ critical thinking. I also saw at least a half dozen specialists at prestigious hospitals, all of whom were equally unhelpful in solving my problem. They were all very quick to prescribe pain medication though, in fact it seemed to be the only thing any of them were ever interested in doing. Some of them accused me of lying about my symptoms, and some told me I shouldn't even bother trying to get better.
If US doctors - some of the best educated and most highly trained professionals in the world - aren't good at thinking critically about medicine, I'm not confident that it's being taught in the US. In fact I'm quite confident it's not taught in the US (or at least it wasn't). I was never taught critical thinking in a classroom setting, and I have multiple degrees from the US.
Sure, it’s not every doctor. But throw a dart at a map and you’re bound to hit one who’s like this more often than not.
It's gotten to the point that I don't really trust anyone on Facebook in certain contexts - although I'm more likely to trust someone if their position shows some flexibility and avoids purely tribal thinking, and also if they show some evidence of background knowledge and general thoughtfulness.
I'm less likely to trust anyone whose position encourages extreme polarisation, who appears to be disguising intent, whose posts are repetitive, and who tend towards inflammatory emotive language and insinuation.
This isn't infallible and I know I've made mistakes in both directions. But I hope it's better than just getting astroturfed.
Edit: I don't think critical thinking skills help as much as they should. This isn't about assessing evidence, it's about assessing intent - which is a different problem.
No, this isn’t the reason, you’re missing some crucial context about the early to mid 90s Internet - most people were using institutional accounts. It was very clear that someone with a whatever.ac.uk or .edu or .mil or even most .com that weren’t ISPs were who they said they were, and anons were explicitly anons. Many people even had phone numbers and addresses in their .sig blocks posting on Usenet, or on their homepages. There was a pretty high degree of trust, it was comparatively civilised!
The problem is that people got stuck in that assumption.
I really don't think that's the case. The issue isn't knowing how to use a computer or not, it's being able to vet sources. That is taught at few schools and actually applied by fewer still.
Digital natives are even more susceptible to internet propaganda imo, since listening to obscure internet voices (with no real credibility beyond the size of their flock of sheep of subscribers/followers) has become so normalized over listening to actual domain experts. A lot of people like to get their current events from some talking head on youtube who selectively explains these topics in a biased way, rather than reading primary sources and developing their own interpretation themselves.It's not geriatrics and baby boomers buying this dropshipped junk from all these influencers, after all. Plus look at all the millenials who stormed the capitol a few months ago based on some conspiracy theory. No, being able to use gmail and microsoft office do not make you tech savvy or immune to propaganda.
I have previously downvoted comments on my opinion on some instances of this on HN lol
If you strike the word "online" this statement works for most of history.
The only things that have changed are the sheer scale, speed, and cost of it. We have small teams that can generate more noise than a nation state could have prayed for just a generation ago.. and they're doing it faster and cheaper than ever before.
Unfortunately, most of the proposed solutions - real names, verified identities, fighting "disinformation" - come with catastrophic downsides.
"Humans have always produced CO2 and cut down trees. The only things that have changed in past 1000 years are the sheer scale, speed, and cost of it."
Everyone has 1 million different opinions that are going to be controversial to someone out there.
I don't want it to be easy for anyone who disagrees with people, on anything, to track down someone physically, in real life.
> Deciding who stays in and who stays
Ok and I don't want you to be able to decide who stays in and stays out.
It should be very difficult to keep others that you don't like out.
And for the very extreme situations, that are exceptionally bad, we have the police and court system.
You should only be able to "keep people out" of engaging in speech if their actions are so bad that you are literally willing to lock them up in prison for it.
That's not the same as having a consistent identity on the internet. You can easily think of an identity provider on the web that doesn't expose who you physically are, think of like a crypto wallet, or something like Urbit attempts. Having a consistent identity is what matters with an incentive to be a good member, we don't need to expose your real world name at all.
>It should be very difficult to keep others that you don't like out.
No, it should be very easy to keep people out, because that's the fundamental mechanism behind any community, defining its borders and limits. That's what freedom of assembly is. There should be many different communities and they all should easily be able to set differentiated rules for who can participate and who can't. This is the basis for pluralism.
A sort of free-wheeling over-connected hivemind like Twitter where it's either call the police or post what you want doesn't work precisely because it is not a community at all. The reason discourse has gone to hell is because there literally is only one and everyone's part of it.
That's why we're having a somewhat sane conversation on hackernews right now. Because this community is smaller, it's moderated, and we can to a degree escape from the shitstorm of mass social media. And that's only because the rules here are much more strict than they are on Twitter.
Its effectively the same thing, for most people.
If someone is only allowed to have 1 identity on the internet, then people would have to link it to their real life identity, for practical reasons. How else would people find me, when I want them to?
Most people have a public identity, and other private ones. If I am only allowed to have 1 identity, then most people aren't going to give up the ability to have a public one, because there is large practical value to having a public identity.
People only having 2 choice, choice 1 being to give up their public persona completely, or choice 2, having everything on the internet that they do, permanently linked to their public identity, is a horrible choice, that will have a huge chilling effect.
> There should be many different communities
Oh, if you want to participate in your own community, that require people to give you their government ID (Or crypto identity, or whatever) in order to participate, then I have no problem with that.
What I have a problem with, is the authoritarian crazies, who want to take away other people's right to participate in the communities of their choosing.
If most other people choose to participate in the normal internet, where most websites do not require you to have a singular ID, then leave us alone and let us do that.
Go ahead and participate in your government ID facebook. (Or I guess that is just facebook already?) Just don't going around saying that no other communities, that value privacy more than you do, should be able to exist.
> That's what freedom of assembly is.
Freedom of assembly also includes people choosing to participate in communities where singular IDs are not a requirement, and alt accounts are allowed.
Sounds like you oppose Inclusion.
For your sake, I hope no one finds that controversial.
a) You can mobilize/pay people to astroturf and create very vocal minorities
b) You can dismiss and discredit actual movements/majorities as a)
At the same time though authenticity (as in no anonimity) is also undesirable given how the companies in charge can't be trusted with it.
The Internet has given all speech a larger platform and more reach, which means that both authentic and inauthentic voices are amplified. Maybe the inauthentic voices gain a comparative advantage to non-Internet worlds, since they gain more attention via outrage or exaggeration. Does the fault lie on social media, content websites, or users?
So do we modify the Internet, or do we attempt to modify ourselves, or both?
The best solution I can think of at the moment is simply to not pay much attention to political speech on the internet.
The main way I've tried to achieve this is by largely limiting what I read to:
1. Authenticated contributors, either people I know personally or hired by companies I trust (e.g. NYT).
2. Anonymous contributors with heavy moderation and filtration (e.g. Twitter, but with O(100) muted words and accounts. My feed is basically just art now and it's delightful).
Again, that's hard to do. I'm still on here for instance.
I would think it would be better to just scroll past the content you are not interested in engaging in. It certainly will be better to know of something happening, even if in brief terms, than to be completely in the dark of it.
If you don't filter, best case scenario your SNR is going to be too low. There's also a pretty good chance that you will end up with a GIGO situation because all you hear about is whatever cable news, Cambridge Analytica, and Amazon's twitter astroturfing squad are pushing today.
If you do filter, you're correct that it opens the door to all kinds of biases.
> It certainly will be better to know of something happening, even if in brief terms, than to be completely in the dark of it.
I don't think so. It's impossible to hear about everything and I feel whatever is newsworthy enough to hit the sources I read is important enough for me.
Whatever unwritten structures that used to prevent that kind of thing have broken down, and it's not just social media doing it. Trump was a perfect manifestation of this problem - he was able to lie about everything and everyone in the most trivially contradictable ways, but faced no consequences for that. Instead, some professional media organizations backed him up.
Only now are we finally seeing lies crest into the territory of legal action, and only with the most extreme cases - like the Dominion lawsuits.
For every smaller kind of dishonesty, it seems like there is no consequences to brazenly lying. Anybody can lie about anyone as long as it's crafted such that the victim isn't in the position to sue (particularly if the victim isn't an individual but an amorphous group, and so showing standing and damages is functionally impossible).
I mean, we've basically left it up to the social media companies like Twitter to enforce basic social contracts like "lying about a global disease in ways that encourage the spread of disease is a bad thing", and their users are bristling at that.
Perhaps there is something in this about internet communications coming/going full circle with more episodes like this Amazon fiasco.
Issues like astroturfing are just expressions of this imbalance of power.
You have to solve for the gross imbalance of power if you want to solve for anything else.
I have bad news for you, but there's no way to control for authenticity.
Someone else pointed out Voice.com in this space, which at least is trying to do it. Although if you read the fine print, the seem to require you to send them a "selfie", I'm not sure how that solves anything.
It is. The problem is that democracy is messy. It means you get to hear from communist and qanon wackos as well as paid shills. Now we're pulling back on this democratization so that we have 'trusted' gatekeepers to tell us what we should and should not be exposed to.
>But if there's no way to control for authenticity,
And that's how it starts ...
The wooly part of the Internet is still out there. But it's not what you're going to see in "polite conversation" as much, because the whole thing has passed the critical mass point of too much information for anyone to know. Much as with books before it, expect the equivalent of Reader's Digest to come along and a whole generation of consumers who are not only tolerant of, but in the market for, such curation.
People need to be trained to be skeptical of voices online.
> People need to be trained
But, hmmm, I don't think a call for education is a solution. That's basically whack-a-mole. Stupid people are born every minute, there's no stopping stupid. Better to put bumpers on them and keep the rest of us safe.
Not a whit.
It's been a hobby horse of mine for the last two decades. From Mk Ultra to Potempkin Villages to Contemporary Psyops, propaganda has provided nearly limitless dark entertainment for me. In fact I've sculpted my own aphorism:
"Intelligence has the ability to construct reasonable sounding reasons for anything." It might have been pithier in an earlier iteration, but that's the gist.
In the end education is expensive and there's no end run around that. In the end there's no algorithm for the truth and there's no end run around that either.
Less free stuff. Free online stuff does not feed quality. Money is the tie that binds. And free stuff binds us to advertisers. Youtube, twitter, facebook, etc, all go to paid tiers and registered accounts.
Eradicate the widespread use of comments. I hate to sound like an old, but go back to established gatekeepers for commentary like well educated editors at newspapers and magazines. Everyone doesn't need a publishing platform.
If that sounds class-ist I guess it kinda is, in a way. Everyone will still have access, but not everyone needs a voice because the structure to support that is corrosive as we've seen.
What I think is possible:
Like everything we learn mostly by making mistakes. Eventually we'll bang our heads against enough walls to find our way out.
In a generation or two people will discount online speech. Already the youngs are discounting facebook.
There will always be bullying, in person or online. There will always be fraud, in person or online. "Education" isn't a magic wand to sprinkle smart dust over the population. Again, even smart people make fundamental and sometimes existential mistakes.
The best we can do is make it harder for those shitty things to happen by performing tourniquets to the flow of free channels that feed online malignant cancer.
Misinformation is like a virus, and it spreads through a population easiest when they accept and share it. All that takes is for it to confirm some preconceived idea or to flatter them. Critical thinking, or at least base line skepticism, seems like the only inoculation.
You're not wrong that that may be too much to expect from people though.
I swear I'm one step away from asking for a chili recipe and someone responding 'blockchain?'. It's beyond parody at this point - I feel like I'm in some Kafkaesque reality.
Heck, the same mostly happens in your community center in really small towns, without care.
The solution he found in the book basically involved signing everything with your own personal identifier and putting it into a blockchain so everyone could verify it.
IMHO we'd need what we can't easily have, single-confirmed-identity-accounts for everyone. If Tim Berners Lee had been more of a pessimist, a historian, and a psychologist he might have baked in some end to end encryption with public/private key pairs and account centrality. But he didn't. I'm curious if the USA or any state power could have required an SCIA for everyone. Maybe it could have come from Apple? I could see some kinda of pre-AOL online thing being baked into MacOs, maybe.
But yea, Facebook tried it and people made a fuss. We really kinda need it. It being a lack of wide spread anonymity for online personas. Invisibility really does bring out the worst in people.
IMHO getting rid of free twitter bots would be a good first step. And yes, I know lots of them do good. But does it balance out? Likely not. Maybe tie them to registered accts? There must be some way to clean house. And, no house is 100% clean, but 80% is better than 5%.