Have you not experienced an avalanche of friends and family members sending you sketchy videos of dubious provenance? The past two years have illustrated to me that the majority of people are just not equipped to distinguish good and bad sources of information, particularly on the internet. That doesn't make them stupid. It just means they are deficient in the particular skill of distinguishing disinformation campaigns. It's a skill that can be learned but people often don't have the time or inclination to do so. Much in the same way that people will put on FOX or CNN and rely on those news sources because they don't have the time, money, or newsgathering ability to do their own investigative reporting. People end up generally picking sources they trust and then relying on them. But that leaves room for disinformation, especially on online sites where untrained people can let their guard down to bad information that has been unwittingly endorsed by a trusted source, whether a friend, or in this case, a familiar search engine. The reason disinformation/propaganda is ubiquitous online is because it works, and it's cost effective.
As far as slavery goes, that's one hell of a slippery slope. Owning a website and curating the information on it is tantamount to kidnapping people and exercising ownership over them and their children? That's like saying someone who "hurt" your feelings is engaging in literal torture and murder.
What I understood from the parent's comment is not that they were equating curating a website and slavery, but more so equating the tactics used. There was more than likely a better example to be used so it couldn't be cherry picked, but their point still makes a lot of sense to me regardless.
Full disclosure. I grew up in the days when the internet was the wild west and absolutely loved it, so I may be a bit biased :)
>As far as slavery goes, that's one hell of a slippery slope. Owning a website and curating the information on it is tantamount to kidnapping people and exercising ownership over them and their children? That's like saying someone who "hurt" your feelings is engaging in literal torture and murder.
Ah, but I was comparing the justification to perpetuate said institutions, not the pain inflicted of the institutions themselves; there's big difference. Perhaps you're right, you shouldn't be allowed to process information as you see fit.
I think the idea that this many people have been duped by disinformation campaigns is in bad faith. People wouldn't be seeking alternative sources if they had any reason to trust mainstream corporate media, and the latter has proven themselves deeply untrustworthy given the number of political scandals and manufactured crises they have grossly misrepresented by cheering them on and making it clear that critical thinking around those subjects is verboten.
So of course people are going to seek sources that do not gaslight them and condescendingly hand them down information, expecting them to eat up every bit of it at face value. Corporate media sources aren't encouraging people to ask their own questions, form hypotheses, and investigate further.
On MSNBC's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski said herself: "telling the American people what to think is our job".
People HATE that! How arrogant and conceited does one have to be to say something like that with a straight face? She, and the rest of her ilk like Brian Stelter, can get off their high horses and treat people with dignity, and step a level up by encouraging viewers to verify THEIR claims and become their own researchers. Not to mention, CNN has become sex scandal central with their own leadership and staff knowingly neglecting and burying them to damning effect once they've been found later, further dimenishing trust.
One only need look at all the conspiracy theories that have turned out to be 100% true these past 2 years on a myriad of topics; and were called conspiracies strictly in order to silence and control the narrative in a direction that's profitable to the corporate media and other corporations, as they see competing information a threat to their own media and products, respectively.
So I'll finish with this point: give people a break and let them seek alternative information. Chances are, if it's not confirmed or found to be false within 6 months of sharing it, because people in high places lied or slipped up and proved them right, these people will be able to reconcile that. You would be pleasantly surprised how diligent these communities are in spotting their own misinformation and broadcasting those findings freely.
> So of course people are going to seek sources that do not gaslight them and condescendingly hand them down information
And what they find are usually other sources which gaslight them far more, but whose (dis)information they then proselytise as if they've Done Their Own Research and finally Seen The Light.
I'm sorry, but that makes absolutely zero sense. Gaslighting your audience means you, as a publisher of information, openly states to your viewers that they aren't capable of finding credible information themselves, and discerning what's true or false. It's also the process of declaring information as "misinformation" and having your audience prove you wrong over and over again — or through more official processes like Congressional hearings, courts, etc. finding that swaths of information shared by the corporate media was largely false after all.
It's telling intelligent people they are less capable than they really are. Truly, no one can make that suggestion without some level of hubris and high-horsed thinking, undeserving of anyone's attention.
Again, these are valid reasons why so many people do no trust our institutions responsible for conveying accurate information with as little bias as possible, which barely exists today, and thus independent journalism has quite successfully taken their place, and as a result, corporate media giants attack these lesser sources as their viewers and ratings observably and objectively plummet (as reported).
> I'm sorry, but that makes absolutely zero sense.
Not to you, perhaps, but it looks to me like this is because you have a weird definition of gaslighting.
> Gaslighting your audience means you, as a publisher of information, openly states to your viewers that they aren't capable of finding credible information themselves, and discerning what's true or false.
No. As I've understood it, the whole idea is not to say that openly, but only to imply it, so your audience (=victim) comes to the erroneous conclusion that yours is the only "truth" they can trust on their own.
> It's also the process of declaring information as "misinformation" and having your audience prove you wrong over and over again — or through more official processes like Congressional hearings, courts, etc. finding that swaths of information shared by the corporate media was largely false after all.
Huh? That's "the process of" gaslighting?!? No, that has absolutely fuck-all to do with it, AFAIK. Pretty sure Hitchcock wouldn't have the faintest idea WTF you're on about. I, OTOH, (unfortunately) do have all too good an idea of what this rant means: That you are yourself thoroughly gaslighted -- or fully brainwashed -- by stark raving MAGAhats.
You think I'm arguing in bad faith? That I'm deliberately advancing an argument I know to be untrue? OK, interesting...
Anyway, moving on, I think you make some good points. Absoultely, so-called MSM has gaslighted people on various occasions. But that doesn't disprove the "duped by information campaigns" premise, it supports it. People are distrustful of MSM because they have been successfully deceived in the past. Millions were duped into thinking that the Iraq War was honestly precipitated by weapons of mass distruction not only because they were lied to by the government but because it was aided by passionate support in MSM, notoriously the New York Times.
And I'm not sold on the idea that communities are diligent in spotting their own misinformation. Look how homeopathy and astrology persist, generations after they have been shown to be bunk. In the case of homeopathy, people often seek it out because they feel duped and misled by Big Pharama. And that's a mistake that people make. They are rightfully skeptical of a mainstream idea but then latch on to an even more dubious idea because it seems like arcane truth, the fruit of their own research against the Brzezinski-esque medical establishment telling them what's for their own good. And then, because of the sunk cost fallacy, they hold onto the bad idea far longer than they should, even propagating it like a religion.
"One only need look at all the conspiracy theories that have turned out to be 100% true these past 2 years." What did you have in mind? I can only think of maybe one (non mainstream I presume) conspiracy theory that turned out to be 100% true. Most of the time, and this is key, just because the mainstream theory had flaws doesn't mean any of its concomitant conspiracy theories were 100% correct. In general they aren't, because like cancer cells they lack a control mechanism to keep them from continuously mutating. Plausible election irregularities turn into pallets of ballots, which turn into the ghost of Hugo Chavez owning voting machines, etc.
One of the problems with deciding to eschew mainstream sources of information, is that you often have no way of determining truth value through your own personal experience or expertise. I'm not a physician, epidemiologist or virologist. In order to conclude anything, I have to have faith that data provided by other people is accurate. In the past, unreliable sources of information were naturally lost over time because they got no support. But with SEO, spam, and/or astroturfing, any bit of misinformation can be propagated as broadly as the truth. And people are expected to wade through that and stumble upon the facts? Maybe, but have you heard of Borges' Library of Babel[0]? It's a story describing an infinite library where volumes are printed with random text, so every possible permutation of letters is there. Everything that is true is there, but so is every lie, and every near truth. But because all information is equally available without regard for truth, the library is effectively useless. That's what an entirely uncurated internet becomes.
>Everything that is true is there, but so is every lie, and every near truth. But because all information is equally available without regard for truth, the library is effectively useless. That's what an entirely uncurated internet becomes.
I don't disagree with most of what you said, but I don't think that's a justification for censorship. The non-curated internet did come up with Wikipedia and a lot of great sources. Some of those sources go from great to bad. Do you trust Amazon reviews? I don't but I used to; I think a lot of people feel the same way. Amazon tried to "fix" it by censoring what it felt were bad reviews, but it didn't seem to work.
I think the main disinformation comes from politics, which, by nature is disinformation. I don't think that, to paraphrase, "people believe dumb things," is a good justification for censorship. Think about what passed as truth in 1850 or even 1920. Darwin of course was censored and the Snopes trial are just examples of where any type of censorship, allowed to stand, halts the progress of a civilization.
Good points, honestly. I'll just add that I don't think down-ranking amounts to censorship, rather it seems a good compromise between that and Babel, in that a casual low-information browser won't see known misinformation as a top result, but a more engaged reader can still locate it down the page if they wish.
But more often than not their reaction to questioning bad information they have shared is "I'm not stupid! I though someone smart like you would get it. It's not rocket science" ..
As far as slavery goes, that's one hell of a slippery slope. Owning a website and curating the information on it is tantamount to kidnapping people and exercising ownership over them and their children? That's like saying someone who "hurt" your feelings is engaging in literal torture and murder.