I vote: literally nothing.

A war on "misinformation" is about as likely to succeed as a war on drugs. The negative effects of it are surely to be even worse. At least "what is a drug?" can be defined fairly easily.

> At least "what is a drug?" can be defined fairly easily.

go on...

Isn't that what we're already doing? How do you think it's going?

Well. Count me up as one who was a die hard Bernie supporter who has made a very hard right turn as my former home (as a progressive Dem) seems to be arguing in favor of censorship at every turn.

If you want more people like me keep thinking you can stifle speech on the internet.

Fact checking is now censorship?

Ahh yes you mean like having Peter dazick or whatever his name is fact check covid source material on Facebook? When his eco health alliance funded it? Yeah. Fact checks alright. Laughable.

Being wrong is now censorship?

What sorta shit conversation is this not trying to have? Your question doesn’t even make sense here.

Collect that fucking .25cents tho bro

Who fact checks the fact checkers?

I dunno.. the coast guard?

I don't really care much for your politics.

I think we can agree that misinformation on the internet by state and private actors is causing damage to society.

How would you recommend we protect against that damage or prevent it from happening? Or are you saying we should just put up with it?

Misinformation is an issue because trust in politicians, the government, journalists, the media and the scientists they use as spokespeople has eroded significantly.

It is probably easier for them to dump 1B into something like this initiative than restore trust in those institutions.

Those institutions—some significantly more than others—sold out their credibility without the aid of any organized conspiracy. What the misinformation actors do do is to smear that mistrust on the good-faith actors.

What alternative proposal would you have?

Alternative? Not manipulating people and being honest?

Here's an example that includes Climate Change.

On the right they deny its existence (they used to believe in it, then didn't as Obama came in, and are turning around again albeit slowly). News and politicians say the scientists are lying and taking money from "Big Green." They then promote coal, oil, and their interest groups. The right is too easy to pick on here because it is just so blatantly anti-science.

On the left there's definitely a significantly closer resemblance to what the scientists are saying, but they ignore what is convenient. There's only really discussions about what is popular. There's minor talk about carbon taxes. There's little to no talk about carbon capture, and when there is they only talk about reforestation (reforestation is great but suspected to not be enough, specifically fast enough) (scientists actually want us to be carbon negative, not zero carbon). There is little discussion outside of electricity and vehicles (which is only 54% of contributions from America). The idea that the crisis is purely political and can be solved politically is still perpetuated, not recognizing we need major scientific advancements (e.g. better batteries, smarter grids, new zero carbon energy sources, inventions in heating, significant reduction in clean energy production that can be exported to developing countries and be cheaper than coal for them --this one is huge actually--, etc). Politicians here blame Republicans for not being able to pass any bill but still are not united on their own front. They still aren't acting with anywhere near the same concern the scientific community has about the issue.

But the real kicker is: why are we listening to politicians about science anyways? I also don't want Bill Nye talking about climate change on TV I want climate scientists. I don't care if it is boring and an unfamiliar face (Fauci was unfamiliar not long ago).

And when they're not honest, because of course they're not going to be, and never have been in the history of history. Then what?

> because of course they're not going to be, and never have been in the history of history.

I wouldn't say that in the past they have been as polarized. In fact you can actually measure this by looking at node connections.[0] But we need to hold politicians accountable. That's the mechanism to keep them in check but we're also failing at that.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stu...

Yes, we're living in a particularly polarizing time. I'd suggest that's probably not random, and it's probably not due to typical human behavior of politicans. Were politicians of the past paragons of virtue? In large part of course not.

So what is different now?

My pet theories for suspects are: social media algorithmically enhancing negative emotions and behaviors, a relative lack of enforcement of white-collar crime (especially amongst the rich), large media conglomorates (not a new phenomenon really, but the current ones are a bit different than past) and wealth inequality.

> Were politicians of the past paragons of virtue? In large part of course not.

No one is claiming they were. This isn't a binary thing, it is a spectrum. So what's different now? Where they lie on that spectrum.

> My pet theories for suspects are:

You and pretty much everyone else. This is extremely common. But these are also pretty common things in history. Though again, spectrum. We're in one of the most unequal times in America. Rich rarely got persecuted, ever (hell, remember the Pinkertons?). Rumors and misinformation used to spread faster than horses could travel. So let's instead look at what similarities there are to historical examples.

Social media isn't common in history, so it's the easiest one to pick out as an outlier.

This isn't the kind of thing that has an easy solution. All the actors in this issue have their own reasons as to why they are incentivized to act the way they have. For example, how news has increasingly become editorialized to try and remain relevant (and profitable) in a changing landscape of how people consume information.

A lot of these things change slowly (and are decades in the making), but aren't apparent until they have changed too much to easily fix so they require a lot of collective work to restore, which is extremely difficult because it often works against the incentives laid out by the environment that caused them to be this way. Using the news example, media sources could simply try to become more rigorous in their pursuit of being trustworthy again, but clearly society has incentivized them to move in the way they have. Running against those incentives runs the risk that it just makes them unprofitable again and then unable to report news all together when they go out of business (or become bought out by wealthy interests with an agenda). So the 'solution' would have to come in some sort of innovation in how people consume media that aligns journalistic rigor and being profitable, which nobody has really figured out how to do yet.

Maybe by our institutions admitting their mistakes and being open and honest about their conclusions.

Do you know how many anti-vaxxers talk about Biden and Harris saying they'd never take the vaccine last year until it was fully FDA certified, or how masks likely don't work because the CDC and FDA said they were mostly worthless to anyone who wasn't a trained professional (before changing their viewpoint, without explanation, last summer)?

How many newspapers, online, and tv presenters either don't even bother with corrections, or run them on page 11 in small font at the bottom? If it hurts the ax they are grinding, they'll never admit a mistake.

Or the way Trump redacted his recommendation to inject clorox and sunshine?

They could try simply not lying anymore.

Nothing. The 2016 Russian Facebook campaign had less exposure than most blogs I read, and who even reads blogs any more?

This is going to do far more harm than it could every possibly do good. Mostly by disenfranchising Americans from participating in the public debate, something I'm pretty sure the US government is expressly forbidden from doing to anyone, even non-citizens.

I think it's pretty normal to be concerned about both foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns, even when the domestic campaigns are billed as 'anti-misinformation'.

invest in education, and give people the ability to spend 30 extra seconds critically thinking about the information they see and where it came from

Half the people on this website can't seem to spend 5 seconds to click through to an article, and you expect 340 million people to be able to spend even more time informing themselves so they can think critically about political issues?

Not that I'm disagreeing with the sentiment, but reading an article on this site generally takes 5-30 minutes, not 5 seconds.

They may be implying that many people don't click through to the article.

What's the point of clicking through to the article if you're not going to read it, though?

Then I’m afraid the only option left is to fundamentally change technology. Faster isn’t always better. Maybe if people were forced to stare at loading pages anymore it would compel them to dig deeper instead of mindlessly scroll.

>"invest in education, and give people the ability to spend 30 extra seconds critically thinking about the information they see and where it came from "

People have been demanding we teach critical thinking in education for decades. And it's not like teacher's haven't been trying to get people to think critically all this time.

The truth is, when we see information that conforms to our worldview, we naturally accept it. We only think critically when we see something we disagree with. Try it yourself, just start disagreeing with someone and watch how good they become at critiquing your arguments.

Arguably, the phenomenon of “fake news” was caused by teaching media literacy that only could identify bias and fake stories in respectable mainstream publications. The tools as taught were not designed to handle blatantly absurd claims.

as an example, I think I saw a few days of material on logical fallacy in 10th grade. It should be a basic competency that is made a priority throughout middle school and high school at every year.

I think this is really a human-nature problem rather than an education or lack of training problem. I believe this to be the case because of all the cognitive biases that we are born with. I also think people's willingness to 'think critically' is dependent on the personality they have. Some people are naturally more curious and open minded than others and no amount of education will change that.

I don't think it is a hopeless cause, however, and it's good to teach critical thinking methods. But I look at this in a similar way to health education. We have been teaching people about good nutrition, healthy eating, and the benefits of an active lifestyle for years but most people don't apply the lessons. At some point more education on the same topics isn't going to help anymore because it's a different kind of problem than not having been taught.

Lets invest $1B into a program to objectively measure which people are least vulnerable to logical fallacies, examine how they cultivated that skill, and build a curriculum for use in every public classroom.

Very few teachers would want thinking students.

Teachers want students who listen and believe what they say to be fundamental truth. Most teachers seek obedience they enjoy molding students.

Whenever I see a response like this it feels like the person who wrote it is a prime target for misinformation. When you think that someone who falls victim to a misinformation campaign are just undedicated or lack "the ability to spend 30 seconds critically thinking", you're not acknowledging that we all process far too much information every day to vet all of it. This isn't something that only affects people who are stupid and/or ignorant.

Ironically, your position as I understand it seems to be the most susceptible to misinformation. Outsourcing critical thought to some trusted authority just means you get that authority's version.

Anyway, pretending that critical thinking is the same as vetting every piece of information you see is disingenuous. Like anything else, there is some severity vs ease of checking position that a given putative fact has. If you're going to die imminently, best to make sure you carefully understand. If it's today's urgent revelations on the news about ongoing issue x y or z, why worry too much how accurate it is.

I do agree it's not the same as "stupid or ignorant" and often these labels are applied to people challenging orthodoxy as opposed to those not thinking critically. It has more to do with credulity, need for acceptance/ belonging, and what I would call religious tendencies.

I read your comment as suggesting that this problem only needs to be addressed at the consumption end - that is, by empowering the public with better critical thinking skills. But I fundamentally disagree, both with the premise that people who are affected by misinformation simply lack critical thinking skills, and by the idea that this is a practical solution to the problem.

This perspective is popular among the intellectual crowd because it appeals to our shared love for learning, but also because it's self-congratulatory. It says "if people just had the skills I have, they wouldn't be taken in", but history shows that's not the case as a general statement. We're all affected by advertising, after all.

As for "outsourcing critical thinking to some trusted authority", that's one of the heuristics we all use, no matter how educated we are, and we all have a collection of trusted authorities. Educated people probably tend to have different trusted authorities and different ways of selecting them - they may produce a better outcome but the strategy is very similar.

For my part I think this problem needs to be addressed on the supply /distribution side as well. We need to work against the purveyors of lies and fraud, and that's how it's always been. That was how we cleaned up the patent medicine system and made the stock market more trustworthy, and in some form (probably not through the DoD) we as a society will need strategies to combat other kinds of misinformation as well.

It boggles my mind that we don't have a semester of "Critical News Consumption" (aka "Defense Against Fallacies") required in public grade school.

But who would teach it? Who would write the text book? Who would design the curriculum? How would this be protected from the same abuses that an "anti-misinformation" project would be susceptible to?

How would this happen at meaningful scale without drawing a response like "CRT" is drawing now and "evolution/creation" did before and in some areas still does?

How do we prevent it from just deepening existing divides?

The misinformation age worries me more than any other current threat because it compounds every other problem and I don't really see a solution. I think it's actually just getting started. (And yes of course propaganda is not new, but the scale, effectiveness, and saturation of it has increased observably in my own lifetime. As a species we are getting better at it.)

If someone convinces me this is solvable or not a real problem you'll genuinely make my day; I really want to be super wrong about this...

Logic and rhetoric can be taught without reference to current events.

Then for a final, give them an hour of CNN commentary and an hour of Fox News commentary, and let them tear both to shreds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

the textbook already exists, and has for a couple thousand years. Just study, master and apply Aristotle

>How would this happen at meaningful scale without drawing a response like "CRT" is drawing now

What do you mean?

CRT = Critical Race Theory

Some groups (in the US) are actively trying to ban teaching it (or some definition of it) in school and some groups think it's essential learning. I'm guessing most have no idea what actually was or wasn't being taught, but that's another issue. The point here isn't whether they're right or wrong to do so it's that obviously education isn't "neutral territory" or something the country is comfortable leaving to the education community. Creation/evolution is the "classic" example of this.

As soon as you try to do media studies or critical thinking at scale somewhere in K-12 someone is going to think that you're doing it maliciously to advance or attack a worldview and it's going to become a mess. Another commenter mentioned letting kids dissect Fox and CNN - how long before those kids say something to their parent that Really Believes one of those channels and that parent goes to the school board with a mob of other Believers? Or someone tries to get a class started or teach a class that claims to be critical thinking but focuses all its time on the flaws in a particular perspective?

>As soon as you try to do media studies or critical thinking at scale somewhere in K-12 someone is going to think that you're doing it maliciously to advance or attack a worldview and it's going to become a mess. Another commenter mentioned letting kids dissect Fox and CNN - how long before those kids say something to their parent that Really Believes one of those channels and that parent goes to the school board with a mob of other Believers? Or someone tries to get a class started or teach a class that claims to be critical thinking but focuses all its time on the flaws in a particular perspective?

wow, I didn't actually thought about it, but it kinda makes sense

it's hard to believe people would fight (at scale) those old and common topics like logical fallacies.

>Some groups (in the US) are actively trying to ban teaching it (or some definition of it) in school and some groups think it's essential learning. I'm guessing most have no idea what actually was or wasn't being taught, but that's another issue. The point here isn't whether they're right or wrong to do so it's that obviously education isn't "neutral territory" or something the country is comfortable leaving to the education community. Creation/evolution is the "classic" example of this.

I've heard people complaining that teachers are incompetent to teach this, is it true?

were they prepared well?

On the logic front, I'll tangentially throw out that I think the problem isn't invalid arguments, but unsound arguments, which doesn't get properly addressed in discussions of misinformation. We're all blindly talking past each other because no one agrees to the premises or on any means of verifying them.

On teacher competency, I would, on balance, trust the teachers I had growing up and the teachers I know now to handle CRT appropriately if they were teaching my children.

To the CRT (and evolution before it) issue, it's an ideological (rather than practical) debate.

To wit, neither side is making arguments in support of their position in good faith. They're saying whatever they think will accomplish their goals, because they're Right (tm) and the other side is Wrong (tm), and thus anything is justified.

Which is the real tragedy of polarization, in that it reduces thinking, independent human beings into mindless ideological automatons.

I work at a K-12. Digital citizenship and online critical thinking is 100% a part of the curriculum at every grade level. I've gone into classrooms at elementaries, middle schools, and high schools and seen materials explaining how to evaluate the credibility of information online.

Unfortunately, approximately 85% of the voting population will never benefit from these classes, because the idea of them being necessary or useful had not occurred to anyone when they were in school. It's the same reason nobody over 50 learned how to use a computer in grade school. They did not exist.

This is a problem that will become vastly less serious three generations from now.

Do you have any keywords for looking up current curriculums? Is it in whatever they're calling Social Studies nowadays?

All schools are local, etc., but with family in K-12 education, I haven't found great or numerous examples of it being taught.

The subject is usually called "digital literacy", although it's often paired with "digital citizenship" because they're closely related or taught together. You might also include "credibility," "media literacy," or "social media literacy."

Including "K-12" or "curriculum" will get you more resources that teachers might use.

Thanks! I'll check them out.

hopefully society can wait that long

Every high school english class I took covered this, save for British Literature. The problem is that grade school is inundated with busywork, memorization, and standardized test prep that no one but the top students cares about anything beyond their SAT score, if not just passing classes.

Grade school needs to be rethought entirely. It's completely broken for the Information Age; no one needs to bother with memorizing minutia anymore, we need to focus on critical thinking.

Personal hot take: memorization still serves both practical and brain developmental goals.

Most kids nowadays can't even do basic single digit multiplication in their heads. Because they never memorized tables.

How they're going to work through complex higher math problems efficiently, when every multiplication (and therefore every division) is a trip to the calculator, is beyond me.

And furthermore, I can't believe all that memorization happened without changes in brain structure, especially at those ages.

IMHO, we need to re-evaluate what we're having them memorize, and probably reduce the amount in favor of more critical thinking, but there's still a requirement for it.

If nothing else, so that you're prepared for higher education, where one of the goals is to cram the fundamental information for your profession into imediate recall.

Right, yes. There are certainly some things you need to know off the top of your head to facilitate learning. Generally the sets of data we explicitly have to memorize are fine- I’m more talking about exams where you’re tested over minutia rather than your understanding of the content as a whole.

For example, I took a history exam where it asked “which of these books was not important to the civil rights movement?” listing three books explicitly mentioned in one sentence of the text and one that wasn’t. That’s the kind of memorization we need to get rid of- we need to be teaching people how to analyze concepts as a whole rather than simply being able to regurgitate the text.

It boggles my mind they allow people to graduate without being able to read, write, or do math.

> invest in education, and give people the ability to spend 30 extra seconds critically thinking about the information they see and where it came from

Where might people who are long out of school receive such an education, if they are not seeking it? And what if it doesn't work as well as you hope it would?

doing nothing is also a choice, with consequences(which are observably harmful) should be considered against the possible benefits/consequences of trying.

To me it is seems worth the attempt, but I'm also not an expert in education policy

> doing nothing is also a choice, with consequences(which are observably harmful) should be considered against the possible benefits/consequences of trying.

> To me it is seems worth the attempt, but I'm also not an expert in education policy

My point is that relying on an ill-specified "invest[ment] in education" with idealistic hopes for its effectiveness is pretty much equivalent to "doing nothing." The people who most need it will not seek it out. If it works (a big if) and it's incorporated into compulsory education, it'll take at least a decade to show any results at all, and whole generation or two to work its way through the population and have a chance to actually solve the problem. And like another commenter mentioned, it's not like our current educational system hasn't been trying to instill critical thinking since before any of us were born, so I have little hope that some new investment will solve that problem.

Relying on education in this case is like having window break during a rainstorm and deciding to fix the problem by ordering a new window from the manufacturer, with a lead time of a month. That might eventually fix the broken window, but it's not going to solve the problem of rain pouring through the broken window now. If you've got a rainy month ahead, the incomplete solution may even lead to more problems, like mold.

This is a problem that requires both long-term strategic and shorter-term tactical solutions.

Nobody in government or political class wants people to actually think critically. They want people to blindly swallow whatever they are told from "approved sources" and consider any dissenting opinions to be "fake news". Its in nobody's interest except the individual's to think critically. You don't need to look very far in any direction right now to see how frowned upon critical thought is

Would be nice if people invested their own money if they felt like it, and kept their hands out of my pocket.

With the atrocious behavior of teacher unions, ignorant government initiatives, and corruption of boards, the education sector is due to be burned, leveled, and completely reinvented at this point.

that's part of living in a society. I agree the current state of education could use a major overhaul, but even what's in your pocket doesn't have inherent value. It is entirely dependent on the strength of the Country issuing its currency. It is ultimately self defeating to desire the country go to shit so you can pay a few less % in taxes

Teach kids in schools how to be critical of all you read? Teach them persuasion techniques and how to spot them, logical fallacies and how to understand them. If your stated goal is really fighting misinformation this will do.

If your stated goal, however, is indoctrination, then yes indeed you need a $1B contract to "fight misinformation with misinformation"

Is it possible to teach people to think critically without actually taking a stand on any issue that requires critical thought?

How about a "Modern Propaganda Techniques" class? In other words, here's how you deceive people and here are tips on effective sophistry. Maybe if you train people to see the patterns that will be enough.

How is it possible for someone to teach a class to identify deception without first being able to identify deception?

I might have misunderstood what you meant. Of course the teacher would know about identifying deception.

I thought you were looking for a way to teach others without using partisan examples/current events because that would imply taking a stand on the issue. And, if you took a stand that might turn people off.

Perhaps people could use various examples from history on now 'settled issues' like prohibition and free-silver. Show them what kind of underhanded techniques they used and ask them to try a modern digital campaign.

> I thought you were looking for a way to teach others without using partisan examples/current events because that would imply taking a stand on the issue. And, if you took a stand that might turn people off.

These sorts of ideas are precisely what I was inquiring about. You seem to be implying that any claim that's involved in partisan politics is either impervious to critical thinking, or that we ought to avoid thinking about such a claim critically because it might upset some people. In either case, that would be the extreme opposite of what any class that teaches critical thinking ought to be teaching.

>"You seem to be implying that any claim that's involved in partisan politics is either impervious to critical thinking, or that we ought to avoid thinking about such a claim critically because it might upset some people."

I wasn't trying to imply that, but I do see how what I wrote was viewed that way. I was looking at this from the angle of the class being an elective. From that perspective, you would be hard-pressed to present modern issues in a way that doesn't alienate half (presumably) of the prospective students. I'm not saying it can't be done but I don't know how to design such a curriculum.

I feel like you'd have to ease in to examining current partisan issues, otherwise the cognitive dissonance would be too strong. Otherwise I think half of the students would just shut down and not take any lessons to heart.

Okay, I see what you’re saying, but that’s literally what thinking critically is. It’s vital that one be taught to identify when they’re not thinking critically. Perhaps it is the case that many people simply refuse to think critically, in which case education about how to think critically is clearly not the problem.

Have a healthy ecosystem of investigative journalists who use encourage critical thinking in their readers by showing evidence of such misinformation.

Educate people to be independent thinkers capable of assessing facts rationally. That is a threat to some people who don't want their sacred cows challenged so we are where we are today.

Has that ever been done successfully on any large scale?

How about increase the budget for education and include critical thinking in classes

Fix non-social media company revenues so they can have healthy journalism departments that don’t have to rely on clickbait innuendo.

I would suggest two avenues:

- making data easily accessible and publishing our own narratives

- building better consensus mechanisms, which can be federated in nature

One of our problems in the US is the media spreading its own misinformation — eg, hyper focusing on a few dozen wrongfully killed black men, while ignoring the thousands dead from depolicing. That kind of misinformation for the sake of narrative has literally killed thousands of Americans.

Contrarily, Russian “misinformation” tends to focus on actual but inconvenient facts — such as US institutions suppressing negative coverage of the Bidens, emphasizing Bidens racist/sexist policies, emphasizing the hypocrisy of the wealthy, etc.

We can’t fight foreign influence operations by way of selective truth telling by bolstering the domestic propaganda — as these programs tend to suggest.

We must innovate better tools for an informed citizenry.

Empower the population to inform itself.

Right speech is a natural outcome of free speech.

I would agree if I hadn't had such a vast array of experience trying to counter misinformation in my online interactions with others already. I blame the bullshit asymmetry principle, aka Brandolini's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Edit: This could be as simple as something that someone heard once and genuinely believes, passing on old wives' tales. Trying to combat a dedicated disinformation adversary is even more difficult.

Right speech is only a natural outcome of free speech if you have a very disciplined population. (Disciplined intellectually, morally, perhaps other ways as well.) Without that... not so much.

So, do we have that kind of population? Examine the empirical evidence. Do we?

I'm not in favor of censorship, but your position here doesn't work.

Dictating "truth" leads to 3 diseases.

1. People get stressed out.

2. People clutch their favorite bullshit in an unbreakable deathgrip.

3. People dictate their bullshit to everybody within earshot.

OTOH, truth tastes better than bullshit. Clearly. Given the freedom to experiment people will come around eventually.

So let's provide the people that freedom.