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What will 2022 bring in the way of misinformation on social media?

14 Comments
By Anjana Susarla, Dam Hee Kim and Ethan Zuckerman

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This is troubling because democracy depends on the participation of engaged and thoughtful citizens.

No it doesn't, at least not the thing we have in most industrialized nations. It requires compliant workers to support oligarchies.

Governments actively engage in the propagation of fake news. Case in point, a recent article where a rise in unemployment was framed by a government official as " people seeking better jobs in a recovery". The perseverance of the public is fetishized to support cuts in social services and more wasteful spending of the public treasury on corporate welfare.

Combating "fake news" is not helped when political and corporate leaders actively engage in the use of such tactics.

5 ( +7 / -2 )

Second, politicians, the media and voters have become scapegoats for the harms of “fake news.” Few of them actually produce misinformation. Most misinformation is produced by foreign entities and political fringe groups who create “fake news” for financial or ideological purposes.

Very misleading assertion. Can easily point to Iraqi WMDs and most of the pronouncements of the previous American administration as outstanding examples disproving this.

Blaming "foreign entities and fringe groups" exclusively feeds into division and xenophobia.

5 ( +6 / -1 )

As long as misinformation is a profitable industry for the media and social media, I don’t see anything getting better. Entropy will continue.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Governments and mainstream media should stop scaremongering about social media and the internet in general.

British tabloid newspapers have been peddling 'fake news' and bigotry for decades to support the politics of their owners and pander to the prejudices of their readers. The very best 'fake news' out there has always been supplied by politicians in their campaigning.

There are TV programmes on UK TV that portray ghosts and haunted houses as real. A sizeable chunk of the human race declines to 'follow the science' and believes in one of a selection of religions, UFOs, superstitions or the paranormal. People in some countries still burn witches. This is hardly the fault of tech.

My elderly mother has been using social media for years. She enjoys it and has never seen anything unpleasant on it. As with most unpleasant stuff on the net, you will find it if you go looking for it and face anger if you provoke it. Just like 'offline'.

The difference between social media and mainstream/broadcast media, is that you can allow individual users to control their own personal filters and block anything that they do not want to read, or images that they do not want to see. It's easy, and maybe the tech giants will start to implement it in 2022 - user-controlled filters for text and degraded quality images that users can improve the quality of until they determine that they want to see them or want to report them.

Social media just allows people a voice, whether they choose to use it for good or ill, to shout or whisper. That's fundamental to a healthy democracy. If you don't like it, don't use it - nobody is forcing you to. State censorship and control of personal communication is toxic for democracy. If you think you want the government to control social media and the internet, you can trial that by moving to China.

Wanting to ban social media/Web 2.0 is like wanting to ban Elvis's dance moves, the right of women to vote, or punk rock in past decades. The sky is not falling in. As for 'protecting the children', they have grown up with it and deal with it far better than their parents do.

2 ( +4 / -2 )

Most misinformation is produced by foreign entities and political fringe groups

No, most is homegrown, distributed by the corporate oligarchy's media

1 ( +2 / -1 )

You cannot censor or delete information in hopes of a better freer future. This whole article reinforces only one theme, everyone is too dumb to decided for themselves so decisions on what you see, hear and read should be left to bureaucrats and corporations.

and now some quotes from some of my favs:

It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

.

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

In 1930’s Germany Adolf Hitlers government used his Hitler youth to burn books they didn’t want others to read. Then later he sent those Hitler youth on a suicide mission to “save” Germany. Basically Hitler never cared for life.

Twitter has recently banned Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA technology.

Very sad how so many can just blindly accept such control over their thoughts and decisions from governments and corporations, who basically, don’t care about life, only re-elections and bottom lines.

0 ( +4 / -4 )

Like more Covid propaganda from governments?

We were told by governments (around the world) that millions of people would be dead from Covid and the Sage group in the UK used worst case projections to ‘terrify’ the UK population.

Misinformation indeed…

0 ( +2 / -2 )

This is just one example of something that was 'misinformation' at one point and banned from discussion, but now all the media act as if it's completely normal. What else will be officially approved?

Vaccines containing microchips were disinformation, people saying that goverments were chipping people for vaccines was disinformation, nobody ever said that a company possibly doing it in the future was, that is the thing, when people repeat things that are not true that is what makes it disinformation, even if something remotely similar happens in the future.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

As long as misinformation is a profitable industry for the media and social media, I don’t see anything getting better. Entropy will continue.

I thought you were using 'entropy' wrong, but I looked it up first, and it was a meaning I didn't know. That's for the new (meaning of a) word.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

The first is that the use of social media, originally designed to connect people, can facilitate social disconnection. Social media has become rife with misinformation. This leads citizens who consume news on social media to become cynical not only toward established institutions such as politicians and the media, but also toward fellow voters.

In the past you could interact with people around you while maintaining a polite veneer wherein you kept your more outrageous or politically incorrect ideas to yourself, but social media has provided a platform wherein these thoughts are vomited up to the world at large.

I really didn't need to know that my uncle is slightly racist and tends to believe in conspiracy theories, or that my best friend's sister, who I always got along with fine, is actually a raging gun nut Trump-loving creationist evangelical. Wow, who saw that coming? We never talked about these kinds of things before, but here her thoughts are, laid bare, and I have to read them whenever I open my browser. Great, now I have to unfriend and block her. And this will make it SUPER awkward to interact with her in the future. How can I not think less of her, or comfortably interact with her, after reading that she thinks school shootings are faked?

Likewise social media allows people who have the same nutty beliefs to feed off one another, reinforce one another's beliefs, and convince themselves they are in the right. And after all of this support and reinforcement, no one is going to be able to convince them otherwise no matter how the facts and research are presented.

Do you want anti-vaxxers spreading fear about vaccines during a global pandemic? 'Cause social media is how you get anti-vaxxers spreading fear about vaccines during a global pandemic.

I wish social media hadn't been invented. And I wish there were a better way to keep up with friends and family around the world than social media.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Social media perpetuate lies.

Lies, lies, nothing but lies, never mind if it is 2021 or 2022..

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

The anti China propaganda mill will be going on overdrive...

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

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