Whats there to replace it? Systematically biased and profit oriented private news sites? State controlled news? Even nonprofit news is gonna be biased. Having some sort of public feedback loop built into any news source is honestly great and always preferable over private “fact checking”. I hate these silicon valley companies just as much, but i prefer social media + community notes over legacy news media with no public feedback mechanism.
public feedback + engagement algorithms != public feedback
Also, plenty of news outlets have comments and voting. How do we know they’re real people and not bots? Same way we know with social media: we don’t.
There’s something to be said for actual journalists and editors who have to build and maintain their reputation.
Information flow pre internet was a nightmare in terms of being manipulated by governments and private news agencies. Saying that centralized fact checking is necessary is saying that people shouldnt be making judgements and need to be fed the truth. Ofcourse there is lots of garbage and fake shit everywhere on the internet, but if you actually want to know the truth its not that hard to find it most of the time.
For obvious hate speech stuff its not that complicated, but for things like the example in this post, i prefer it when random people give me a source over some mega corp being allowed to determine whats correct.
If for example there was not tons of live data about Gaza from social media, people would probably still be called terrorist supporters for even suggesting its a genocide. There might be some small sources talking about it, but without the overwhelming trove of evidence streaming out of all the social media platforms, there would not be enough info to actually make a case.
Im pretty confident, that without social media there would not be an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.
There is lots of talk about governments, parties or individuals like musk influencing elections and its valid, but the funny thing is, before the internet this was even more extreme because all information that the average person received about politics came from government approved papers. If you went too hard against the vietnam war, your paper would be demolished.
Whats there to replace it? Systematically biased and profit oriented private news sites? State controlled news? Even nonprofit news is gonna be biased. Having some sort of public feedback loop built into any news source is honestly great and always preferable over private “fact checking”. I hate these silicon valley companies just as much, but i prefer social media + community notes over legacy news media with no public feedback mechanism.
public feedback + engagement algorithms != public feedback
Also, plenty of news outlets have comments and voting. How do we know they’re real people and not bots? Same way we know with social media: we don’t. There’s something to be said for actual journalists and editors who have to build and maintain their reputation.
Of course, Gramma, now it’s time for bed.
Information flow pre internet was a nightmare in terms of being manipulated by governments and private news agencies. Saying that centralized fact checking is necessary is saying that people shouldnt be making judgements and need to be fed the truth. Ofcourse there is lots of garbage and fake shit everywhere on the internet, but if you actually want to know the truth its not that hard to find it most of the time.
For obvious hate speech stuff its not that complicated, but for things like the example in this post, i prefer it when random people give me a source over some mega corp being allowed to determine whats correct.
If for example there was not tons of live data about Gaza from social media, people would probably still be called terrorist supporters for even suggesting its a genocide. There might be some small sources talking about it, but without the overwhelming trove of evidence streaming out of all the social media platforms, there would not be enough info to actually make a case.
Im pretty confident, that without social media there would not be an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.
There is lots of talk about governments, parties or individuals like musk influencing elections and its valid, but the funny thing is, before the internet this was even more extreme because all information that the average person received about politics came from government approved papers. If you went too hard against the vietnam war, your paper would be demolished.