How do you counter misinformation? Critical thinking is step one
How do you counter misinformation? Critical thinking is step one
10 comments
-
The problem is that too many people think they are thinking critically. Pushback, fact-checking, and ridicule are all seen as evidence that one is correct because the crackpots all think they're fucking Galileo.
-
Too late for that.
-
With a fist? Is punching the source of misinformation a viable solution? I mean, it's not like it's caused a huge rift with irreversible damage or anything right?
-
We live in a post-truth era. You can't trust anything, not even video or audio. You can't trust your typical institions like the federal government. You can't trust the "free press". You can't even trust that the comments you read online on your favorite social media site aren't written by a bot.
How do we adjust to this? I guess "critical thinking" is a pretty good thing to have, although do we trust the general population to have that ability? Common sense sometimes isn't so common.
I think what people need is to expand their "media diet" to all sorts of different sources. Read Fox News, read RT, watch GOP debates, read Al Jazeera and the Jerusalem post. Follow pro-Russian telegram groups and pro-Ukrainian subreddits.
When everyone is lying, everything is like those logic puzzles they used to give us as kids. With all the boxes. You have to figure out what some group has an incentive to lie about and what they don't.
Israel has incentive to downplay their crimes - like when they arbritarily killed that journalist. Al Jazeera has incentive to amplify all crimes by Israel. Truth is usually somewhere in the middle.
-
Everyone isn't lying though. The framework for seeking truth hasn't actually changed, people have only grown more cynical. Many have simply given up, and many others have ideological interest in pretending truth doesn't exist. It's just a new iteration of an old game of repression.
The basics are still the same though - first you need freedom to engage with the truth as an individual or collective. Anyone who would deny you that is definitely hiding something. Then you need agency and actualization. Anyone who wants to keep you too busy or tired to seek truth is likely lying to you. This really isn't that complicated - individual liberty, press freedom, academic freedom, etc - these are the foundations of truth. Those who seek to preserve them are trustworthy. Those who seek to restrict them are not.
There is admittedly a good amount of grey within these boundaries, but taken cumulatively, integrated over the long term, this framework creates a solid foundation.
-
im only willing to expand my media diet so far. If a source has proved to be purveyers of false infromation in the past it wastes my cycles to take them into account in case they have improved their standards. One thing though is to recognize independent bodies. Like im fine with fox chicago news but not fox cable news.
-
I think it depends on topic, which is what I was trying to get at with my comment. Everything is biased, so virtually everything has been a purveyor of false information depending on your interpretation.
It's just that certain sources are more guaranteed to lie about certain topics.
Example CNN at least historically has been very "catastrophising" so perhaps something about climate change may show only worst case predictions.
Whereas Fox News may intentionally downplay climate change studies.
The truth is somewhere in the middle- climate change is a catastrophe but we're talking about the most serious effects probably not showing up for hundreds of years. Etc
Maybe a bad example but my main point is that you can't trust any one organization and instead need to get a sense of the big picture in order to determine the truth (or as close as we can get to the truth) for yourself.
-
-
10 comments