Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.22-053931/https://www.ft.com/content/bbc80e1c-60a7-4f3d-a9a1-a4e68cf36912
In the past, established media organisations largely followed the same news agenda, within national boundaries. But in an increasingly borderless and splintered information environment, the old gatekeepers and norms are increasingly bypassed.
This has led to the ongoing bifurcation of publishing platforms online, including social media, into overtly right- and left-leaning spaces, where different agendas abound. As a dual citizen of X and Bluesky, there are clear differences in the topics I see on the two platforms.
Here’s another weakness of the misinformation discourse: that this is uniquely a problem on one “side”. Research finds that while America’s conservatives are on average more likely to believe false statements about climate change, liberals are more likely to believe false statements about nuclear power. Other studies of the US find those who went to college are no better judges of news veracity than those with only high school education.
I don’t highlight this to criticise any particular group. Quite the contrary. I do so to emphasise that most people — left, right, more and less educated — simply don’t interrogate every claim they encounter.
Humans are efficiency-maximisers, seeking shortcuts at every opportunity. The truth is the vast majority of us are never going to invest time fact-checking or evaluating all the information we consume. If it seems plausible and comes from a source we don’t actively distrust, that’s good enough.
It isn’t possible for the vast majority of people to fact-check the information they consume online. My guess: you’d conservatively have to spend two hours scanning through academic papers, or more specialist sources you trust, for every one hour on lemmy.
Around fifteen years ago I started learning about climate change. At that point it was an eye opener to repeatedly see almost diametrically opposing headlines based off the same academic paper that obviously had the same (admittedly usually multi-faceted) conclusion.
It was and is very clear that you never could trust ‘mainstream media’, never mind whatever sources are around now, or bots on social media. Forget ‘ai’.
If there is fault here it is in the amount of information we allow ourselves to be subjected to. A mitigating circumstance is that social media, and sites like feddit.uk, upon which I am reading your post, are addictive. There is a spectrum of addictive behaviour and less overwhelming addictive behaviour on a personal level has a huge impact on a mass scale.
Us humans are always seeking stuff that gives us a dopamine hit, and if it wasn’t social media it would be retail therapy, vaping, caffeine, sex or any number of other engineered substances or behaviours. But given who is controlling information now, the world really would be a much better place with a lot less internet use at this point.