Obama Says Social Media Falsehoods Spur Skepticism on Politics (bloomberg.com) 275
Former U.S. President Barack Obama warned that the way Americans communicate on social media networks has weakened democracy. Bloomberg: Obama, who owns the podcasting and film company Higher Ground, warned that "citizens no longer know what to believe" thanks to false information spreading online. This is leading to political skepticism among citizens, he added. "The very design of these platforms is tilting us in the wrong direction," he said Thursday during a conference at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center. Hate speech, vaccine misinformation and state-sponsored amplification of fake news are feeding people's desire to read sensational content, the former president said. While Obama acknowledged that some of the most odious content, such as racism, white supremacy and conspiracy theories, existed "long before the first tweet was sent," he argued that "solving the disinformation problem" on social media networks could help build trust and solidarity among citizens.
The government (bureaucrats and politicians) (Score:5, Insightful)
You elected them you know, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem here is billionaire cash. Lots of it. An unlimited supply.
But also, folks who watch political adverts and Fox News and go to rallies because they think politics should be exciting and fun.
Real politics is a slog. It's work. When you treat it like a game this is what you get. Imagine if we treated our jobs the way we treat politics.
Re:You elected them you know, right? (Score:5, Interesting)
Real politics is a slog. It's work. When you treat it like a game this is what you get. Imagine if we treated our jobs the way we treat politics.
On the nose.
Your typical voter of every politic stripe want to solve their frustrations with an "exciting" candidate who will solemnly promise to go the Washington DC and solve difficult problems with simple and easy solutions. When that fails, they double down on "it's Washington DC that is corrupt". No, it is the voters who are corrupt, and they are getting candidates that reflect who they really are.
In the world of software, you might well fire the leader who wildly overpromised and underdelivered on his project. But if you chose to replace him with the job candidate who makes the biggest promises because his yarn is so "exciting", the coming failure would be on you.
Re: (Score:2)
The system is broken.
It's supposed to represent the will of (all) the people, but ends up ignoring most of them.
It's supposed to work for constituents, but instead works for corporations.
Populism is a symptom of a broken system.
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No, it is the voters who are corrupt, and they are getting candidates that reflect who they really are.
You actually sound like you're not American, or do you not realise that America's two party system is effectively lock in such a way that it is statistically impossible to vote for someone one then the two lumps of shit on the ballot?
And by vote, I mean actually have your vote counted. Sure you can tick another party, but in a system that doesn't have preferential voting or any other ranking system and is FPTP winner takes all you may as well just walk into the booth and set your ballot on fire.
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The fact you think Sanders has any credibility speaks volumes.
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Re: You elected them you know, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I completely agree. I mean sanders uses to say the millionaires and billionaires and changed that to just billionaires once he became a millionaire, but at least when questioned he stuck to his guns and said you can go out and make a million dollars too.
I forgot which home he was staying at when he gave those quotes. I've managed to lise track of how many he owns.
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A millionaire is not a big deal anymore once you count assets, and you don't need to be in the 1% to be a millionaire. Many rural farmers are technically millionaires, especially if they inherited the land. Count the retirement accounts, 401ks, house, etc, then as many approach retirement age and had a decent salary then they're often approaching the million dollar mark.
Re:You elected them you know, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Politicians set up billions in government grants and funding to huge organizations like unions, nonprofits, groups like Planned Parenthood etc. Billions of it get funneled back either as direct campaign contributions, dark money, super PAC money, or 'in-kind' help like running their own get-out-the-vote drives (but only in areas of the electorate that support their party).
Round and round it goes, and the elites get fatter in the process.
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The problem here is billionaire cash.
Indeed. It is outrageous how the billionaires were able to buy the presidency for Jeb Bush.
Did you even read my subject line? (Score:3, Informative)
Trump was allowed to beat Jeb because the billionaires knew Trump would play ball. And Play Ball he did. He gave $3.5 trillion away in direct subsidies and a pittance to working Americans. And that doesn't even count the crap he did to keep the stock market afloat through election season. He'd set up a bomb to blow up the economy as soon as he was safely back in office, and the bastard would've gotten away with it if COVID hadn't happened. Ironically COVID saved us fr
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You do know that the majority of US billionaires are Democrats that actively support liberal causes, right?
What blew up the economy was a combination of Democrat governors shutting down business in their states helping lead to supply chain issues followed by a very big excess in money giveaways by Congress. The combination of pent up demand, trillions of "stimulus", and the Fed printing more money to cover all the drunk spending lead to inflation.
Re:Did you even read my subject line? (Score:5, Interesting)
What exactly did Trump do to keep the stock market floating? And what exactly did he do to set a bomb ?
Here is the thing. Under Trump we has cheap energy. Almost every time we have had cheap energy, the economy does well. High energy costs and it suffers. It's just that simple. It doesn't matter who is in office or what party they belong to, the economy has tended to do well. It takes a bit of time to get rolling but that is just a trend that has seemed to follow over the last 50 or more years.
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Farkers who claim politics is slow motion and real slog are the ones playing games. Gov't moves at a lightning pace when it wants to do horrible things. The same speed can be applied to good things, but the game players want you to think otherwise.
Re: You elected them you know, right? (Score:3)
Re: The government (bureaucrats and politicians) (Score:3)
So Mr. "If you like your doctor you can keep your Doctor," Mr. "Shovel-ready Jobs," Mr. "I won't add one thin dime to federal debt" thinks it's "falsehoods" on Social Media that causes skepticism on politics?
Is he serious?
Re:The government (bureaucrats and politicians) (Score:5, Insightful)
Tip: never get your news from politicians.
Or their corporate allies and mouthpieces.
Re:The government (bureaucrats and politicians) (Score:4, Informative)
"Big Tech’s campaign to protect President Joe Biden and his agenda has continued unabated. The Media Research Center found more than 640 examples of bans, deleted content and other speech restrictions placed on those who criticized Biden on social media over the past two years. This included 140 cases of Big Tech censoring people over the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden story in late 2020.
MRC Free Speech America tallied 646 cases in its CensorTrack database of pro-Biden censorship between March 10, 2020, and March 10, 2022. The tally included cases from Biden’s presidential candidacy to the present day.
The worst cases of censorship involved platforms targeting anyone who dared to speak about any subject related to the New York Post bombshell Hunter Biden story. The Post investigated Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s allegedly corrupt foreign business dealings. Big Tech’s cancellation of that story helped shift the 2020 election in Biden’s favor. Twitter locked the Post’saccount for 17 days. In addition, Twitter slapped a “warning label” on the GOP House Judiciary Committee’s website for linking to the Post story."
Re:The government (bureaucrats and politicians) (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sad when one has to resort to defamation and insults instead of an actual rebuttal.
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That's an interesting theory considering the democrats are the only party to ever have an actual KKK affiliation, and actual people who were members of the KKK, the most recent one being Robert Byrd until he died in 2010. They're also the only party to ever be pro-segregation, both today and in the past, and they're the only party that openly supports bringing back racial discrimination.
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At least the dog only has a 50/50 chance of lying to you.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As long as you ask the right questions, a dog never lies.
"What's on top of a house?"
"How does sandpaper feel?"
"What's a ride like in a car with a busted suspension?"
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Just put a slashdot moderation system on it (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting to contemplate what would happen. Would everything be severely modded down into invisibiity, by chair-warriors of one political extreme or the other?
What would remain?
Innocuous vacuous pablum tiktok videos?
Re:Just put a slashdot moderation system on it (Score:5, Insightful)
If you give everybody the ability to moderate, you get echo chambers like Reddit.
If you give out mod points randomly, as with Slashdot, you get a random result.
This place has been quite political as of late, and it's been a complete grab-bag as to which way the moderation swings. Discussing politics online is a fool's errand anyway. Nobody goes online to have their opinion changed - it's all about trying to reach those mythical "fence sitters" (which may be about as likely to exist as unicorns).
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Slashdot mod points are not random. They get abused a lot too, and while I won't go into details the site admins spend a lot of time fighting that abuse.
It doesn't scale. It's manageable with the number of users on Slashdot, but for social media with hundreds of millions of users it won't work.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Social Media wouldn't work with a /. moderation style system. The problems are numerous:
* Who determines who gets to moderate? If everyone then you have group think. If random then messages will be lost in a sea of noise.
* Stupid Juvenile Whiners / Corporations / etc. would demand removal of the downvote button.
* Having a "serious" discussion on social media is pointless. Topics are complicated. You can't summarize a complex issue in a single tweet.
* People are assholes online. Expecting people to have a
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Twitter != social media
FB, youtube, tiktok.... insta...whatever.... linkedin... reddit... all variant forms of user generated content sites i.e. social media, in the general sense of that term.
and they all have different social characteristics, and I suppose, different problems.
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Slashdot doesn't make anything invisible, just read it at -1. I think its a good compromise. I tend to ignore the moderation. A lot of the time it doesn't give a good indication of content anyway.
But for those people that need to protected from offense they can do so.
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If agreement allows upmoding then disagreement should be downmoding.
I've heard the reason down isn't used is that people should reply instead of downmod.
Shouldn't that apply to upmodding as well?
And do you even care about karma?
I ignore it.
I never click the "No Karma Bonus" because I post so rarely it doesn't matter.
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I don't know how to break this to you (Score:4, Funny)
And no, for the record I don't, but there is a creepy weirdo who keeps creating accounts like rsiilvergun (two ii's) and stalking me. I am dead sexy though, so who can blame him? Or her, let's be fair.
Can't get worse than www.nu.nl (Score:2)
Any 'wrong' opinion gets your account banned.
It's the leftist media themselves which have been woked to such an extent that we should no longer call news sites like www.nu.nl news sites anymore.
It's nothing more than an outlet for leftist propaganda.
Speaking of which (Score:2, Insightful)
50 senior intelligence officials signed a letter saying that Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign. Last week, the New York Times admitted it was true. Why aren't those 50 accountable at all?
50 senior intelligence officials signed a letter saying that Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign. Last week, the New York Times admitted it was true. Why aren't those 50 accountable at all?
50 senior intelligence officials signed a letter saying that Hunter Biden's laptop was
misfire (Score:5, Insightful)
Although the previous poster was an oddball, posting the same line 5 times, he was correct and you were unjustified in your response.
The offending dishonest election interfering latter is right here [politico.com]. In it, the signers carefully state that they have no proof, BUT they then cite their many long years as so-called experts in the field and tell the readers that their great expertise informs them that the American people should see this as Russian misinformation. It's all cleverly worded to convince the American people the laptop story is planted false Russian propaganda, while providing the authors with deniability - it's almost like these dirty birds were trained in lying and disinformation or something...
Essentially, they wrote "The laptop is Russian propaganda, trust us experts on this because we can read between the lines even though we cannot show you the hard proof."
There's a difference between a random person on the street telling you "I have no proof, but you should know that you have terminal cancer" and an oncologist who has just examined you telling you "I have no proof yet, but you should know that you have terminal cancer and I'm sure the evidence will be available soon". These former intelligence officials were invoking their professional experience as they knowingly peddled a gigantic lie to the American people in order to manipulate the voters in an election; they're despicable, and nobody who believes in honest elections should support this or excuse it.
Re: Speaking of which (Score:3)
And he's right (Score:4, Informative)
But most of the falsehoods on social media are exact, in context quotes from politicians.
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If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan
https://www.politifact.com/oba... [politifact.com]
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You note that they're only interested in "eliminating falsehoods" (from their perspective), not in "trying to become more trustworthy."
So it's all about convincing people and not at all about making sure they don't give out false info.
Wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
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I guess you'll be driving to work on all those privately owned roads instead of the publicly funded roads.
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The founding principles of the US are more along the lines of Libertarianism. Government should be marginalized and minimized.
No. The federal was marginalized, but government itself was not. The local gov't could choose to seize your presses, seize your personal property for token compensation, put you in jail indefinitely, etc. And when push came to shove, those "freedom loving" Confederate states resorted to terrorism and murder of their own citizens to keep people in line. Isn't that original form of gov't oh so perfect?
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you, this "fouders were libertarian" is some post-hoc historical revisionism. There were many founders many of them having famously public disagreements. The Constitution is the result of compromise amongst a wide school of the political concepts at the time.
Libertarian favorite Jefferson supported the idea of updating the Constitution every 20 years or so:
The idea of amending constitutions at regular intervals dates back to Thomas Jefferson. In a famous letter, he wrote that we should “provide in our constitution for its revision at stated periods.” “[E]ach generation” should have the “solemn opportunity” to update the constitution “every nineteen or twenty years,” thus allowing it to “be handed on, with periodical repairs, from generation to generation, to the end of time.”
Re: Wrong (Score:2)
Are you joking?
Re: Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Not my phrase, Nassim Taleb's. (Its application to Obama's policy approach is mine.) He defines Soviet-Harvard Delusion as follows:
"Thinking that the reasons for things are, by default, accessible to you. Also called Naive Rationalism."
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Sadly he's not. Nevermind that Obama was lecturer at one of the most prestigious law schools in the world.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. The root cause is the widespread absence of critical thinking skills. This IS a problem of the citizenry, but it can't be solved by the institution of a Ministry of Truth. Nobody will trust it, and the moment anyone DOES start trusting it, it will start lying.
People who have been untrained in the practice of self-examination will always automatically call "true" anything that fits their biases, and "false" anything that does not, damn the details. People like this will latch on to their favorite source of misinformation and white-knuckle it to the grave. The cure is to, some how, instill in to them the capacity to recognize fallacious reasoning, to seek evidence even for conclusions that are pleasing to them, and to actively seek counter-evidence to their own beliefs. It's a lifelong process, and it requires discipline, and many people hate it.
We can't stop the misinformation from flowing but we can encourage and bolster education. It isn't easy and it isn't 100% effective, but education IS the only way to acquire critical thinking skills and so that's the only solution that will actually work. So, IMO, that's where our focus should be.
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If only schools would return to teaching kids how to think instead of what to think...
Where did he say that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or do you just not like the way he eats crackers? [duckduckgo.com]
Re:Where did he say that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Inherent in how someone formulates a problem is what they believe the solution should be. Coming from a former highest ranking man in the government, the message is clear.
"Duuhhh, he didnt say it but I know he meant it!"
Thanks for confirming you made up the part about him calling for government regulation.
And once again, thanks for the lesson on internet misinformation.
That's nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's because guys like you only care about one side's misinformation and are perfectly happy to let the other handled in kid's gloves at best. No; it must be all or nothing.
That said, if you raged about the left media suppressing Hunter Biden's laptop story around the election, I've judged you wrong.
That's why I support both sides' misinformation, we can't trust the contents of that laptop and sunshine cures COVID.
Global warming needs to be dealt with before I eat my Cheerios today and a cabal of lizard people run pedophile gangs from a pizza parlor basement. Coal fired plants are the worst ecological threat we face today and windmills cause cancer.
I don't see anything wrong with this strategy.
If anyone should migrate ... (Score:3)
What worked in the 1700's is often not applicable to the modern world. I wish there was a country all the libertarians could migrate to, but don't make it the USA.
The founders of the USA were far far closer to libertarians than marxists, I say let the marxists move. Hell, there are marxists states in existence already; their homes, farms, factories are waiting for you. :-)
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I say let the marxists move.
Do you really believe there is any significant number of marxists, or anyone subscribing to any communist philosophy in the US?
Or are you confusing that with socialism? I find that most people in the US seem to mix up those concepts.
If you would like socialists to leave, then would you include into that group anyone who gets given taxpayer money from the government? So, who would that be?
Big business, that get subsidies?
Old people that get medicare?
Veterans that get VA medical care?
Parents that get child su
oh, really? (Score:2)
I'd bet you like that free speech stuff... and the right to defend yourself, and to have the government need a warrant before going through your stuff, and that bit about you being free to believe what you want (freedom of religion), the right to assemble peacefully, the right to a jury trial, the right to not have the government show up at your house and force you to provide room-and-board to a bunch of soldiers, a government with some limits on what it can do to you, etc.
NOTHING in the US Constitution is
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> It was also founded on the principle that it should change with the times.
Well put! Too many beatify the Constitution as some universe-wide truth.
Re: Wrong (Score:2)
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Yeah but our current crop of politicians is not going to come up with something better.
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Which is the point, changing the very underpinnings of your government should be difficult and require significant effort. Oddly enough it wasn't that difficult and happened with relative regularity until that authoritarian dickweasel FDR threatened to pack the courts and got the commerce clause perverted to it's current incarnation. Incidentally, this also led to the drug war and all the harm it has caused. Funny that.
solving the disinformation problem (Score:4, Insightful)
"solving the disinformation problem" means "only information I agree with should be allowed"
problems on both sides of the aisle (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the left trying to shut down alternative facts? Maybe. But there are a few gems spread by the right that are just bizarrely insane.
Social media and the internet in general just amplifies and accelerates something that is already there. A lot of malcontents dissatisfied with the way the world is turning out for them, ready to fabricate a fantasy where they again matter. And a political machine ready to spin doctor any tidbit for the perfect sound bite to feed to these unhappy masses.
Is Obama a Marxist ready to destroy American? Wishful thinking. We would be better off if he was.
Re: problems on both sides of the aisle (Score:2)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyr_complex [wikipedia.org]
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A lot of what's called "misinformation" is opinion. It's to a point that if someone states, "Biden is a horrible President", it would be labeled as "misinformation" by those that think he's a great President. Differing opinions and different ideas of how to solve a problem are not misinformation. They're things which we need to encourage so that we can have actual debate.
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Help, my opinions are unpopular!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well... not unpopular. As the issue seems to be, that it's being said "We need to find ways of stopping people sharing these opinions". It seems they're perfectly popular opinions, hence it apparently 'being an issue'.
So it's more "We need a way of stopping opinions being shared that *I* disagree with". And that would be unreasonable. So it needs to be framed as preventing disinformation. To stop disinformation, you fund an activist group to become "The Centre for Fact Dissemination and the Eradication of M
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The party in power is never the majority. A large chunk of the population is moderate supporting positions from both sides of the spectrum and flips their votes once the party in power gets too drunk on that power and shifts too far from the center. We're seeing that now as the Democrats are letting the far left Progressives control the party platform and many are calling for primarying any Democrat that's not far enough left. The Tea Party did the same to the Republicans.
But your point about minority ri
Re:solving the disinformation problem (Score:5, Interesting)
You demonstrate immense ignorance with that statement. In fact your statement demonstrates the problem perfectly by being a falsehood.
There is no 'problem' at all with outlawing things someone disagree. That is easy to do.
The problem is combating lies without outlawing things people disagree with. That is hard to do, hence the word problem.
In other words, the thing you are complaining about, pretending Obama did not understand, is the exact thing Obama was discussing.
The problem can be cut into two different issues. 1) Intentional falsehood and 2) Stupidity based falsehood.
Intentional falsehood has certain 'tells', namely anonymous, foreign content, uniformity of topics (i.e. that IP address never talks about anything but one topic and never looks at porn. No porn is a big tell). Those are all relatively easy to detect and mark. We could even color code it, your post shows about racism show up with a green flag while your opponent has a red flag because he is a Chinese citizen who refuses to give his name, and only posts about American racism,
Stupidity is harder to deal with. I am always surprised that the Q-Anon people have figured out how to eat food. Not sure what to do there. Besides offering poisoned food next to safe food with the words "Democrat approved poison-free" on the safe food. The Q-Anon people would die in a week.
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Demanding consent and obedience is not the same as devaluing disinformation. Now, society can't survive unless there is rule by consent, or extreme authoritarianism, which is why cultural norms tend to be dishonest. But there need to be limits on that dishonesty.
US politics has been off the path of mostly-true, for a long time. The rich loved Reagan-ism and it became a cult that no-one was allowed to stop. As with any cult, as it gained more power, it had to hide more facts (eg. US imperialism, climat
Re:solving the disinformation problem (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nonsense. Disinformation is intentional factually wrong information used to further political goals, usually through organized campaigns. We don't need to get sophistic about it, disinformation is not opinion.
False dichotomy is false. (Score:5, Informative)
You're shifting the burden of proof (Score:4, Insightful)
For anyone reading this guy's comments seriously go look up a YouTuber named Aronra. He's got several good videos on how young Earth creationists shift the burden of proof away from themselves when they argue for the Earth only being 6,000 years old. This is the same thing.
The people spreading the misinformation of the ones making the claims without backing them up. Then they demand we prove that every one of their nonsensical claims is false or they must be allowed to continue to spread nonsensical and harmful false claims.
It's called a Gish gallop and it's a rhetorical technique dishonest people use. Learn to spot it so people can't use it against you. Otherwise you're just letting them make you into a chump.
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Ironic. Consider this... (Score:2)
Thanks to all the government documents released and all the investigations, we now know that President Obama KNEW the Trump-Russia Collusion narrative was false and made-up by Hillary Clinton's team while he was still President in the fall of 2016. For the entire years-long fight in the courts, in congress, in the press, and in the popular culture as Democrat-aligned media and social media companies pumped that info-poison into the arteries of American politics and culture, Obama KNEW it was "misinformation
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"solving the disinformation problem" means "only information I agree with should be allowed"
Oh, are you one of those crazy ivory tower philosophers we hear about one believes that all truth is an illusion?
Personally, I believe the world is filled with facts. And getting the correct facts is really important. Giving incorrect facts qualifies as disinformation.
Now, there's also more abstract concepts like "good" and "bad" that don't quite qualify as facts themselves, but they're often rooted in a proper collection of facts. For instance, "Bill shot Bob" sounds like Bill is bad, though "Bill shot Bob
Jimmy Carter. (Score:2)
"Obama Says Social Media Falsehoods Spur Skepticism on Politics" So the problem is not the fact that all American career politicians are just lying scumbags, it's that people tweet about stuff.
Only remotely honest politician in my life time was Jimmy Carter and he was an awful president.
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We should do away with the office of the President entirely. It's no longer a suitable position for decent people. And the system is rigged so that only the carefully chosen anointed are even offered the spot.
In the Senate at least we know and accept that everyone is a scumbag. Somehow your average American thinks the President is above all that dirty D.C. politics.
Re: (Score:3)
Biden was carefully chosen. He was the candidate who, as a former vice president, was least likely to be seen as a risk. He was the safe choice.
Trump was carefully chosen. He was the candidate who, as an outsider, was least likely to be seen as a corrupt politician.
They were both carefully chosen using less-than-ideal selection criteria, much like a graphic designer taking great care in choosing between multiple tiny water guns and deciding on the green one because it is the ideal shade of green, while
Well the mainstream media did select Trump ... (Score:3)
There's no way in the world anyone can convince me that either Trump or Biden was carefully chosen.
Actually the main stream media sort of did select Trump, unintentionally. During primary season they focused extensively on Trump and relatively little on the other republican primary candidates. As Trump started to become a real contender they gleefully focused on him even more, the biggest prank/gag they could imagine was helping him become the republican nominee, which would of course ensure Clinton's victory. So the thinking during primary season was.
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The media pushed Trump because Hillary's advisors thought he would be the easiest to beat.
Misinformation is faster and safer than truth. (Score:3)
Misinformation spreads 20 times faster than truth [slashdot.org]. This incentivizes social media to reward those who spread misinformation because "engagement," and discipline those who accuse others of lying because that's just not civil.
So civility is valued more than truth, and moderators are More Devoted to Order Than to Justice [theatlantic.com].
Slashdot treats misinformation and incivility roughly equally, but NextDoor for example has a way to report incivility but not misinformation except in very limited cases. I think that's why it's such a cesspool.
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You mean misinformation like Trump and Alfa Bank were in cahoots? That misinformation?
Maybe this is an old lesson, but Watergate (Score:5, Insightful)
The Watergate scandal was taught to me in the 80's as the moment the American public started to lose faith in the credibility of government. I guess the Vietnam war going on didn't help either, nor did veterans being denied medical care because the American government decided it was a police action, and not a war.
The erosion of the voters faith in government started happening well before social media.
Re: (Score:2)
The Watergate scandal was taught to me in the 80's as the moment the American public started to lose faith in the credibility of government. I guess the Vietnam war going on didn't help either, nor did veterans being denied medical care because the American government decided it was a police action, and not a war.
I think you let some disinformation slip in there at the end. Vietnam veterans were eligible for medical care, the determining factor was whether the medical issue was service related. not whether congress filled out the paperwork for a "war".
Politics (Score:2)
I remember covering the Watergate scandal in High School.
I don't remember covering the Teapot Dome scandal, though. Which, once I found out about it, made me wonder why not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Politicians, including Obama have nobody to blame (Score:2)
They need to all look in a mirror. Politics is dirty although the portrayal is supposed to be one of civil discourse and debate.
There have been many lies over the 235 years since the constitution was first penned forming us into a Republic.
What happens is that we don't hold those politicians accountable and by being accountable that means voting them out of office. It's a self-feeding issue, people get pissed off that politicians fail them and then don't vote. That's why incumbents in congress get routinely
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'Politicians are lazy fuckwads'
Nah - they spend a lot of time asking donors for money, which is the real problem in our political systems (I'm a Brit, with the same problem).
social media should be subscription-only (Score:3)
The need for advertising revenue drives the need for increasing user engagement, which leads users to rabbit holes filled with disinformation designed to keep them paying attention. Advertising also drives the need for personal data aggregation and analytics, negatively affecting privacy and security.
Facebook seems to make about $50 per quarter per user in the US and Canada. So they wouldn't make as much with subscriptions as they do now with advertising, but it seems a fair tradeoff to me.
Re: (Score:3)
Facebook seems to make about $50 per quarter per user in the US and Canada.
I'd pay $50/quarter to use a social media site that serves me, rather than serving me.
Thatâ(TM)s not all that social media does. (Score:2)
It's not that. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, the thing that creates scepticism is Trump saying that he will release his tax returns, "lock her up", "drain the swamp", and then doing none of those things.
Does he expect us to believe this? (Score:2)
By the time Obama ran for office, US voters had become utterly disgusted with the whole system. He promised hope and change, and as a result, the Democrats were given one of the most sweeping victories in recent history. Even conservatives in traditionally Red states voted for him.
What did Obama deliver to the people who trusted him? Mitt Romney's health care plan, and little else. He couldn't even get a Supreme Court justice confirmed. He proved to be a 100% corporate-owned tool of the corrupt system
Skepticism is good (Score:2)
This is leading to political skepticism among citizens
Unless someone was counting on the gullibility of the electorate to get their own message across.
Free Speech Destroys Democracy! (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)m sorry but⦠(Score:2)
I hate to bring it to these guys, but paying teachers $40k a year is not going to do much more than pump generation after generation of Daily Mail readers and click bait consumers.
Re: (Score:2)
Even that would be an improvement over the current education system.
Obama (Score:3)
It's Obama who spurs skepticism. Censors do not like truth or dissent.