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.
What I was talking about is that while you disconnect from antivax people you might not notice they are growing in numbers. I don’t mean to say you have to engage or debate them because it’s not about facts anyway. That’s because antivax people are a symptom and not the cause and that leads me to another point. Given that rationality is not guaranteed in liberal democracies then we should consider politics to be merely means of negotiating terms of a shared reality with people that have potentially very different opinions.
You can say „I’m right so things should be done my way” but there’s no central authority that decides who’s right so in the end we can only rely on common laws that we agreed on.
To your point specifically, I’m not saying you should hang out with antivaxxers. You should hang out with diverse groups that might happen to include antivaxxers so you can talk to them and socialise them at least. Learn what their real issues are because vaccines certainly ain’t and it’s just a proxy for their mistrust of the system in general. Maybe once we get to the bottom of that then we don’t have to deal with antivaxxers at all which would be cool, eh?
I was trying to illustrate that filtering out (mis/dis)information it is not only important for your mental health, but also from an epistemological standpoint. All good epistemological systems (science, fair and accurate journalism, etc.) filter out/exclude a lot of point of views. I agree, there is no central arbitor of truth, that’s why good epistemological systems are doubly important.
If your process of finding knowledge isn’t based on good epistemological systems, you will drown in the pool of noise that you get from just listening to people around you. But if your epistemological approach is sound, then yes, interacting with a lot of people will make you understand the world better.
You’re still on about factuality and finding truth as if that is going to solve the issue of antivaxxers. In the end you’re right but what are you really achieving? Did that make people take vaccines? Seems like that’s still declining so I’m talking about keeping societies functional by addressing underlying reasons for why we deal with antivaxxers at all.
Having knowledgeable researchers that can help produce vaccines, and having at least a part of the population be knowledgeable enough to make sane decisions about their healthcare…
It’s a prerequisite to solving ”the antivaxxer issue”, though not sufficient.
Did I get it right that you think that the masses don’t take vaccines because they are dumb?
I think the masses, by and large, are still taking vaccines. The ones who don’t are stuck in epistemic systems that amplify noise (social media, conspiracy theory groups, right wing cults etc.).
I seem to be doing a poor job at making my point here. Hope you appreciated the conversation regardless.