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.
Tricky. Bifurcation certainly is the right word here but claiming that both sides are equal participants doesn’t quite cut it.
I’d be willing to settle on “both sides do it, but one more than the other”. And often the motivations are quite different, e.g. hate against minorities on one side, hate against the haters on the other.
The problem in the USA is that what looks balanced (red vs blue, Republicans vs Democrats) really isn’t: it’s a huge fascist mob against everybody else.
Far-right populism does not only embrace but squeeze every drop out of (social) media influencing. We can learn something from this, but not to the point of copying their disregard of truth and ethics.
It is bifurcation because both sides are completely blind to the issues that drive them. What you’re saying suggests that you are quick to brush those issues and ignore your own. Not every MAGA / Orban / PiS or whatever voter is an evil sociopath. They might have issues that are entirely unaddressed by the other side and choose a lesser evil for them because they were taught you can rely only on yourself by all brands of neoliberalism.
both sides are completely blind to the issues that drive them.
That is an extremely broad statement which I can’t accept just like that, you’re going to have to back it up with sth, explain yourself.
Also, what both sides? It’s kinda obvious in the US but you now bring specifically European arguments and the European political landscape has more than two sides.
In most places with declining democracy all of the major parties are neoliberals pretending to be either conservatives or liberal left.
When conservatives vote for right wing politicians promising them to bring back the jobs they are deceived the same way as liberals voting for centrist politicians promising wealth for everyone who tries. Neither delivers on their promise so which side is really achieving anything? Maybe both are beating a drum to a war that benefits only the wealthy?
The truth is the vast majority of us are never going to invest time fact-checking or evaluating all the information we consume.
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.
What concerns me especially is how much this problem could be aggrivated if society ever embraces VR/AR which would allow everybody to literally live in their own reality
It seems to me like every part of the human experience that silicon valley touches eventually turns to shit. Enshittification isn’t just limited to social media platforms. It can come for whole legacy platforms of the human race itself, like our political discourse and social fabric.
Filtering out certain information flows is an integral part of freedom from speech, not an indication that you are in an “echo chamber”.
Both can be true. You need a safe space or an echo chamber for your mental health but you can’t go too extreme and otherwise disconnect from society as a whole. All of us were surprised when first Trumps and Orbans started to gain popularity. Maybe that surprise is a proof that we disconnected too much in general.
It’s not about mental health per se. For example, if I as a researcher want to search for scientific information, it’s good that I can exclude anything but scientific articles. Similarly, excluding flat earthers and antivaxxers from a social media site will probably improve the general public’s understanding of the world.
It’s just pragmatism. The alternative is to have everybody listen to all information - at that point it becomes impossible to find the signal in the noise.
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.
what are you really achieving?
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?
