Your brain is mapped.

Dear god people - we know how to create malformed content.

To assume you are immune is like assuming you are immortal or that your computer is unhackable.

Modern Misinformation is malformed code, being done at scale.

It’s cluster bombing civilians who can never muster the resources to defend against it.

It’s not about you. It’s about the attacker.

Are you arguing that the people who decide what's misinformation and what isn't are somehow immune to that kind of hack on their reasoning faculties?

That’s a better question and moves the discussion forward.

Yes - and No.

To fairly answer your question, there’s different levels of sophistication to misinformation.

It ranges from vaccines will grow you another arm, to the Gates foundation is using this to impoverish nations. (I’m loosely using current examples)

So yes - experts can and will be able to avoid many of the misinformation attempts out there. The ones which they fall victim to - in their own area of expertise, are likely unavoidable.

For google to remove healthcare misinformation, they will be targeting the obvious content that has been flagged and likely supported by govts orgs.

I feel that many people are arguing about the case where the gatekeepers are wrong - which was an issue in a world where traffic through the gates was more orderly and the gatekeepers had historically been mistaken in stopping traffic.

Right now, even if I don’t like gatekeepers, I have no choice.

Someone has figured out to how to mass produce obviously and subtly malicious traffic.

The issue at this juncture in time is the lack of effective filtering.

Since we don’t have a better solution, we get forced to use gatekeeping.

And what happens when the gatekeepers get captured?

You keep mentioning in this thread “malformed code” as if nonsense Facebook posts are executables my brain is loading.

What do you mean by “your brain is mapped?”

I’m using malformed content because I’m on a coder forum. It’s the easiest analogy to apply.

We know how brains operate and process information. We know that it’s not going to treat information in an unbiased manner.

It processes identity information, threats, statistics and out group information differently - among a whole world of idiosyncrasies.

Attackers sadly also know enough how to create content that subverts that processing in precise manners.

It’s content designed simply to propagate and defeat logical or rational scrutiny.

Its filled with the kinds of logical fallacies that maybe YOU would defeat, but are so broadly spread that it will always find victims.

Those victims are then set up for the next round of content and then the next round.

Eventually this content dominates the discourse. It’s like suddenly everyone knows that the yeti was an astronaut.

Google misses more misinformation than it finds - and this is even if we discuss only America or the English speaking world.

Smaller nations aren’t even coveted, and rare languages or regions don’t even have automated analysis

Your conjecture is that there are “attackers” out there disseminating this information and it is the majority of content?

Why is it so hard to believe that people will simply be foolish and create garbage on their own?

Because that’s yet another category of junk that does exist. And yes that’s easily going to be an order of magnitude larger.

But that doesn’t mean attackers don’t exist, or that they happily co opt those communities to seed and propagate their content as well.

And most of that content stays up. It takes a lot for any of the tech cos to act right now.