Should mis-information on the internet be rooted out and destroyed?
If so who decides what is mis-information?
Who gets to be the official censor of thought, speech and intellectual discourse?
Who is the final arbitrator of truth?
As I researched the term antifragility today I came upon an article about misinformation and the solution to ridding the internet of it.
The answer was a pleasant and intellectually satisfying response.
Realistic? I don't know, but powerful? Yes.
Living with Misinformation
Seems to me that a space made up of humans is always going to have (very human) lying and deception, and the spread of misinformation in the form of simply not having all the facts straight. It’s a fact of life, and one you can never totally design or regulate out of existence.
I think the closest “solution” to misinformation (incidental) and disinformation (intentional) online is always going to be a widespread understanding that, as a user, you should be inherently skeptical of what you see and hear digitally.
[…]
As long as human interactions are mediated by a screen (or goggles in the coming “metaverse”), there will be a certain loss of truth, social clues, and context in our interactions — clues that otherwise help us determine “truthiness” of information and trustworthiness of actors. There will also be a constant chance for middlemen to meddle in the medium, for better or worse, especially as we get farther from controlling the infrastructure ourselves.
Source: Matt Baer, who founded the platform write.as, speaks about on misinformation and disinformation.
My Thoughts
- This concept lies at the very heart of anti-censorship and this was one of the principles the founder of Steemit, the Proto-Hive wanted to infuse his creation with, anti-censorship.
- Thought... a radical concept, that we view everything with suspicion until proven valid, or proven not invalid.
- We grew up consuming journalistic reports on the TV and Newspaper, believing the first principle, that the reporters were reporting facts, not opinion.
- Who, What, When, Where, How and possibly...possibly Why..were the basis of responsible and award winning journalism. Journalist travelled to the ends of the earth to get the story from the horses mouth, the perpetrator of the crime, the real heroes, pictures of the real monster, etc etc etc
- But we transferred the faith we had in these journalist to our current journalists and to things we read or see on the internet.
- This has led to our downfall, processing misinformation, lies and twisted falsehoods as truth or allowing it to shape our lens, with which we view the world.
- Many a person has been ruined by misinformation, lies and falsehoods.
- Leading one innocent man to exclaim...where do I go to get my reputation back? The world will now always see me as the guy accused of an unforgivable cruelty, not the guy falsely accused.
We have a responsibility
As the citizens of a new planet, where we are all connected by and receive the majority of our information from the internet, we must all promise to put our thinking caps on when we read things on the internet.
Look for The Who, What, When, Where, How and Why?
And ponder it's validity.
We live in a world of truth and lies, honesty and deceit, and information and misinformation.
Recently I found a new word string on the internet, it was alternative facts and it was used to explain statements at odds with or directly opposite from the truth.
That was two new words creating a pretty facade or pretty face for an old word we all know well the meaning of...the old word is lie.
So as you go out into the world of the internet, keep your thinking caps on, turn on your truth meter, ask questions, be suspicious and even paranoid, because in truth your not being paranoid, if they are out to get you, as in lie, deceive, scam, swindle...
The world is filled with good, bad and ugly.
Let us be thinkers and discerners, if not of the truth, at least recognize the questionable.
@shortsegments