Facebook, Twitter, and Google Still Aren't Doing Enough About Disinformation, EU Says (theverge.com)

Facebook, Twitter, and Google still aren't doing enough to battle disinformation on their platforms, European Union officials said in a statement released this week. "As part of a plan to fight disinformation on social media, the companies signed on to a voluntary proposal to crack down on the problem last year, which included making plans to increase transparency and fight fake accounts," reports The Verge. "The European Commission is now publicizing monthly progress reports on the topic, and has released the first, covering January." From the report: In the statement, the officials criticized the companies' responses, saying "we need to see more progress." "Platforms have not provided enough details showing that new policies and tools are being deployed in a timely manner and with sufficient resources across all EU Member States," the statement said. "The reports provide too little information on the actual results of the measures already taken."

Facebook, Twitter, and Google were each singled out for not providing enough information in their reports to officials, who said in today's statement that they remain "concerned by the situation." The statement pressed the platforms to move faster ahead of European Parliament elections in May. In an accompanying op-ed in The Guardian this week, EU commissioners said, "if we do not see sufficient long-term progress, we reserve the right to reconsider our policy options -- including possible regulation."

Comments

Censorship by any other name

[Anonymous Coward]

Battle disinformation = conduct censorship. No difference.

Re: Censorship by any other name

[Anonymous Coward]

They ARE the disinformation.

Re:Censorship by any other name

[ShanghaiBill]

"Censorship" is not what it is when a TOS is enforced on a private website.

It is when it is compelled by the government, which is what the EU is doing.

Censorship in China works the same way. It is not done directly by the government. They outsource it to tech companies, who do what they are told so they can stay in business.

So what's the difference?

Re: Censorship by any other name

[Anonymous Coward]

Pity you're a moron. Censorship is censorship and requires no government.

The concept of freedom of speech existed and exists outside of the US's first amendment and the barely comparable apings of Eurotrash.

Re:Censorship by any other name

[BlueStrat]

Battle disinformation = conduct censorship. No difference.

Exactly.

Much like the long list of other parallels that exist between the EU and the former USSR.

The EU is well on the path to becoming a "kinder, gentler" USSR-style super-State. No surprise the EU is resorting to similar authoritarian measures against "wrong-think" and for suppressing dissenting voices.

Strat

Re:Censorship by any other name

[Jane Q. Public]

Indeed. But it's even worse than that, in a way.

Even if they wanted to block disinformation -- and they don't -- they are incapable of knowing disinformation from the other kind.

Not just because of normal human limitations, but also because of their inherent (and by now obvious) biases.

Robotic Filtering

[mentil]

Using automated content filtering is how you get cases like Marvin the paranoid android. Please, think of the androids!

Re:Robotic Filtering

[postbigbang]

More simple still: put a flag of the country of origin of the IP address and the user. Both of these are known values, easily placed. Add TOR exit nodes with an exclamation point. Easy.

That pesky 1st amendment

[Anonymous Coward]

Disinformation is that which displeases the strongest and most violent.

Disinformation

[manu0601]

I am all in favor of suppressing disinformation, but who should decide an information is truth or not?

We all remember Irak's Weapons of Mass Destruction, a government backed information followed up my many medias, which turned to be a huge fake news. It was so fake that US invaders did not even manage to plant fake evidence to support it after they "won" the war.

Re:Disinformation

[gbjbaanb]

Can you. I thought he was criticising Bush there. You kids know nothing!

A good reason to use Iraq's WMD as an example is because it was many years ago, so long ago that nobody will come up with the tired tropes they do today to deflect from their favourite president. So today, you say "Trump did bad" others will jump up and reply "but Obama did badder", and vice-versa.

with WMD it is now "history" and thus a little past the tribal politics, we can use it to highlight the problem with fake news quite well as it not only stands up as a prime example, but is self-contained and not nearly as mixed up in current politicking.

Re:Disinformation

[manu0601]

A good reason to use Iraq's WMD as an example is because it was many years ago

Indeed, this is exactly why I chose that example, rather than more recent government-backed fake news for which there are remaining supporters.

Re:So

[Excelcia]

You're not wrong.

Twitter and Facebook have been the flagship champions of empty-calorie non-information from their inception. How anyone even cares about 'dis' information there is beyond me.

Anyone who uses Twitter or Facebook for "information" in the first place deserves to be the victim of disimformation.

Re:The EU is full of greed.

[Luckyo]

The far more likely context is the upcoming EU parliament elections, where it seems that pro-EU parties are going to get a serious beating as the anti-EU sentiment is rapidly climbing across most of the member states. One way to curb this would be to sensor any news painting EU in a negative light as "disinformation" and anyone spreading it as "bad people with bad agenda".

Mainstream media across EU is largely on board with this and has been for many years. So to lock the information down completely, one needs to attack the remaining vectors. That would be major social network platforms. Facebook, twitter and google shoved their own necks into the noose when they signed on, because one of the key reasons these platforms are popular is because they allow people to talk about things that mainstream will literally persecute you for talking about. The good part here is that this isn't about them, but internal power struggle within EU. So people within those corporations who signed on are likely banking on the fact that they're very much outsiders in this fight, and by taking side with the authorities, they will be kept out of it.

Your free speech is not disinformation

[AHuxley]

What do European Union officials want to ban now?

Who is saying what disinformation is?
The user has the ability to publish and link to any information they want. Its their comment.
Why should an NGO, think tank, mil, any nation, European Union official say thats not approved speech?
Spain on a comment about Catalonia?
Germany on history?
Germany on its open migration policy?
China on Taiwan?
Big agriculture wants some Ag-gag laws?
France wants to ban funny comments about politicians and all news about protests?
No comments on DRM?
No comments on political movies not selling well?
No right to talk about repairing brand name products with imported parts?
Weak junk crypto is a banned topic?
No linking to published whistleblower news about the mil and security services?
No funny memes about NATO?
No comments on EU nation arms exports to really bad nations?
No funny memes about EU nation censorship attempts?
A computer company on what needs to be curated and what speech is a sin?
Social media on what politics it will allow?
Will the EU has a blasphemy test for questions of faith? Can any faith, cult, theocracy tell the EU what they think disinformation is?
Can a Communist party demand the removal of information on democracy, faith, history, freedom by nations in the EU?
No saying Taiwan is the real China?

Do European Union officials have books, movies, plays, publications that want to ban due to "disinformation"?
Why stop with reporting and removing content online?

Go full German BfV on all EU publishers and online comments?
The US freedom to publish and the to stay free after publication is looking great after the views of EU nations.

Re:Your free speech is not disinformation

[AmiMoJo]

Is anti-vaxx stuff protected by freedom of speech?

If you shout "fire" in a theatre and people are injured or killed trying to escape the non-existent conflagration, you may be liable for that. If you convince parents not to get their kids vaccinated and they suffer illness, life long poor heath or death as a result, "free speech" doesn't seem like a very good defence.

"Oh but I just told him where the money was, how to get in after hours and what the combination of the safe was! That's just information, I was helping him making an informed choice to rob that bank or not!

On the one hand we of course want there to be open discourse and concerns about vaccinations discussed. But on the other hand the consequences of spreading misinformation and FUD can be deadly. Even in the US the constitutional right to free speech doesn't protect you from any and all consequences of what you say.

And actually all the EU is asking for is for companies to do what they claim they want to do (to remove harmful material from their networks).

Re:Your free speech is not disinformation

[freax]

Here in the EU it's always the judge who decides whether or not you broke the law by speaking. Never the government or the legislative branch. You see, we have separation of powers since the enlightenment period.

The legislative branch creates the laws. The judge interpretes and executes the law (makes it happen, judges). The executive branch ensures that the law is applied (policing, imprisonment, etc).

So who decides? The judge after the legislative branch has creates the laws that the judge needs in order for him to interprete them.

It really is like that here. It's not a farce or something. It's in my country also the constitution. And separation of powers is also a de facto requirement before you can join the EU and/or if you want to stay in it (see Poland and Hungary who are both being told, clearly, by the EU, that they should not interfere with their country's juridical branch - and else you can fuck off from the EU).

Re:Your free speech is not disinformation

[Z80a]

On the example of the theatre, you can easily consider the shout something that is not speech, as well, you're screaming.
And on the case of not vaccinating, its not the speech itself causing the trouble, but not vaccinating.
And its way easier to just make illegal to not vaccinate your kids and keep tabs on what they took or not than creating a 1984 hell where all speech is monitored by the government.

Re:Your free speech is not disinformation

[AHuxley]

No medical comments?
No talking about crypto and DRM? Who gets to set what "material" is to be removed?
What speech is a sin?
What will be curated and who can lobby for all other sinful material to be removed?
A movie company what wants the negative "political" reviews of their new movie to stop and all past comments and links to be removed?
A hardware company that has a lot of failed product on the market but wants people to stop having the freedom to report on defects?
A faith group that wants to stop people from talking about leaving the faith, changing to another faith?
Can a faith group demand full legal EU nation blasphemy protection for its teachings?
No talking about the results of national and city politics in the EU?
No funny memes as the art work is so good it has to be the result of another nations gov/mil experts?
That a funny joke had to be created by another nations experts?
No comments about China and the history of Communism due to EU trade deals?
No comments allowed on a Catalan declaration of independence?
EU nations, cults, brands, actors, political groups, think tanks will have the money and lawyers to sway EU law to block speech and publication due to their own presented views.
Thats why the US view of freedom of speech and freedom after speech is so great.
People can publish, comment, review without fear of an EU government saying no to further publication in the name of an NGO, cult, brand, think tank, faith, mil.

Re:Your free speech is not disinformation

[AmiMoJo]

I don't think the "but I said it at normal volume therefore free speech" defence is likely to stand up in court. You can also imagine scenarios where shouting is not necessary.

The more fundamental problem here is people conflating freedom of speech with freedom from consequences. There would be no need to ban people from saying certain things, only to punish them for the consequences. And that has been happening forever, e.g. fraud, true threats, masterminding crimes, leaking classified information etc.

Re:Your free speech is not disinformation

[Z80a]

What the tech companies, EU etc want is to ban people from saying certain things.

Re:So

[ShanghaiBill]

Anyone who uses Twitter or Facebook for "information" in the first place deserves to be the victim of disimformation.

The problem is that these people can vote, so their delusions become everyone's problem.

Who decides?

[argStyopa]

It's a pretty fine line between "preventing disinformation" and quashing free speech and dissent.

Is UKIP saying "Britain will be better off after Brexit" disinformation? Is Trump saying "some illegal immigrants commit heinous crimes in the USA" disinformation? Are directed wikileaks exposures disinformation? Is truth a defense?

Re:Who decides?

[Brett Buck]

The line is not that fine, this is a broad jump across it.

    Of course, the real issue is that they need to figure out a new way to shake down the major US players for more cash.

Re:Who decides?

[DNS-and-BIND]

The EU is made up from the wisest people in Europe, who went to the best schools. They are well able to decide what's true and false. Britain will not be better off after Brexit, that's fake news which must be deplatformed. So many lies out there doing harm.

Re:Who decides?

[swillden]

It's a pretty fine line between "preventing disinformation" and quashing free speech and dissent.

You're right to be concerned, but wrong about the problem.

The problem isn't that it's hard to distinguish disinformation from free speech and dissent. Oh, you can find examples of cases where it's hard to make this call, but they're cases where the truth isn't actually all that clear. By and large, it's very easy to distinguish disinformation from honest, thoughtful disagreement, and the exceptions (a) aren't terribly important and (b) tend to clarify in reasonably short order.

No, the problem isn't that correct use of centralized disinformation-suppressing power is impossible, it's that incorrect use is possible. To talk sensibly about this, we have to first understand the context:

Traditionally, the lack of central control, the high cost of information distribution, and the inability to target narrow sub-audiences defined by interest/opinion has allowed truth to be distilled from the hubbub. Slowly, inefficiently, but usually effectively, simply because it was too difficult and expensive to push disinformation to broad audiences. Even in autocratic states with a monopoly on information distribution, the truth was hard to contain, because people understood the monopoly power and were skeptical of it.

But the world is different now. Information distribution is very close to free, which has created an information glut. In the overwhelming flood of information, people have to be selective; they simply cannot consume all that's available. This makes it easy to form self-targeted segments who choose the information they consume based on what feels true to them -- meaning what tickles their own biases most effectively. This self-segmentation occurs naturally when people have too much information available and deep power to be selective. Worse, those self-selected groups become echo chambers, reinforcing their shared biases. (Note that this happens across the spectrum of ideas; not just on the left or the right). That in and of itself would be mildly problematic, but it's only the beginning.

These "filter bubble" and "echo chamber" problems are turned up to 11 when people with deep resources realize that it can be exploited; that they can infiltrate the self-selected groups and feed them targeted disinformation which both exploits and exacerbates the group biases. This is a real problem, particularly on the right. For various reasons, the left is more prone to self-deception and bad judgment but less susceptible to manipulation. The right is more vulnerable to this sort of manipulation, so we see more of its effect there. Note that I didn't say the left is invulnerable, just less vulnerable.

The EU (and other governments) see a real, legitimate problem here. But their proposed solution, to demand that disinformation be suppressed, is a risky one because it requires building an infrastructure of information suppression, an infrastructure that can -- and mostly will -- be used to suppress harmful disinformation, but could -- and likely occasionally will -- be used to suppress legitimate dissent.

There's another, more subtle problem here as well, the anti-democratic nature of information suppression systems. Even if they are only used to suppress egregious disinformation, their mere existence creates doubt in the fairness of important institutions. Worse, the self-selected population segments who embrace the disinformation being suppressed will see the suppression as not only casting doubt on democratic institutions, but as proof of their destruction/subversion by the "enemy". This is precisely the facet of human nature that makes it so difficult for autocratic regimes to successfully push their preferred narrative, turned on its head.

What is the solution? I don't know. Ultimately, we need to pop the bubbles, to remove either the ability or the desire of people to self-segment into information echo chambers. Man

Re:Who decides?

[ganv]

Yes, this is pushing us to address a major confusion about what kinds of communication are acceptable and what are not. It doesn't work to use truth status as the main distinction...because as you say there are major disagreements about what is true. We are currently in a crisis over 'communication with a hidden agenda'. Our communication channels are so full of self-interested communication in the form of advertising that people have started assuming self-interest and dismissing messages with clear sources and agendas. It becomes more effective for self-interested communication to hide its source and agenda. With source and agenda hidden, purposeful disinformation becomes a more effective tactic. People are trying to make this illegal, but it is very hard to do that without an authority deciding which messages to suppress.

Re:Who decides?

[serviscope_minor]

For someone who claims you like freeze peach so much you sure don't like it when someone uses tiers to disagree with you.

Yes UKIP and the Tory party spread misinformation. That's not really up for debate unless you deny reality.

I do like how you spin anyone disagreeing with you as being against free speech. Free speech means you are free to lie. Free speech means I'm free to call you out when you do so.

Modern examples

[Okian Warrior]

I am all in favor of suppressing disinformation, but who should decide an information is truth or not?

We all remember Irak's Weapons of Mass Destruction

In modern times, we get the following:

a) Buzzfeed reports that Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, which Mueller's office contradicts the next day.
a) Buzzfeed reports on the Covington students, they were lambasted in the media for about a week, then better video evidence was available
b) Jussie Smollett gets attacked in NY by two white, MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporters who put a noose around his neck and splash him with some liquid. And later charged with obstruction for making the whole bit up.

I find it particularly entertaining because Microsoft NewsGuard counts "Drudge Report" as fake news. "Drudge Report" is mostly a story aggregator (as Slashdot is for tech news) and doesn't have many news stories on its own, so it can hardly be considered "fake".

...however, when the recent government shutdown ended they managed to get the scoop on *everyone*, so many people read in the news that the government shutdown had ended, and Microsoft readers were told that it was fake news!!!

Scott Adams made an interesting suggestion for a fake news filter: if it's on all 4 major networks (Breitbart(*), Fox, CNN, MSNBC) then it's probably not fake. This is an interesting take, because the left-leaning outlets tend to wait for the full story when it's potentially bad for them, and the right-leaning outlets do the same when it's bad for their side. Waiting until both sides agree that the information is available and solid would prevent problems of "instant speculation gets the story wrong" like the Covington students or Jussie Smollett.

If you have an eye for humor, the current MSM is right risible. Some 80% of the population (84%, by a recent poll) now doesn't trust the mainstream media for just about anything spectacular.

By going after conservative outlets as "fake news", the public now labels the MSM as untrustworthy.

That's hilarious!

(*) Yes, Breitbart. Get over it. Breitbart has more readers than the next two networks (Fox and MSNBC) *combined*. CNN is in 4th place.

Re:Modern examples

[fafalone]

Because clearly bias is binary and not a spectrum. The reality of situation is, yes absolutely the outlets like CNN and MSNBC etc have a liberal bias, but the degree of their bias, their intention to mislead, isn't in the same universe as Breitbart and Fox News (yes, some are, but the cable networks and giant print papers, no). E.g., improperly verifying source info or nitpicking details to call something a lie just isn't equivalent to being deliberately misleading and showing overt, maliciously unbalanced bias.
It's like, CNN gets some specific detail of the 2567614th awful thing Trump said/did wrong and issues a correction a day or two later, meanwhile Fox News is spouting 'Look at how the fake news media smeared the honest, upstanding, genius Donald Trump! Now here's our 10-part series on how the caravan of MS-13 and ISIS is a full-scale invasion and will destroy America!'
CNN: Trump told 18 lies today. Fox News: The Fake News CNN called one of those 18 "lies" a lie because the number was 14,000 and not 15,000! Now here's our piece about how Trump and Huckabee-Sanders were truthful and sending the right message when he said thousands of terrorists were caught trying to cross the Mexico-US border even though the "actual" number was just 6, who were on a watchlist and not confirmed terrorists.'
Yes, it was bad fact-checking bias to call 15k instead of 14k a lie, but then Fox News/Breitbart immediately followup their 'caught the liberal media being biased again!' with overt hostility towards the truth, blind worship of Trump, and bias so severe it makes whatever they were calling out seem like a paragon of neutrality.
Fox News: "MSNBC lied when said the middle class didn't benefit from Trump's tax cuts!" (Because they got a few hundred in pay or tax benefits) "This proves Trump was truthful and correct in saying that the tax cuts hurt the rich and him and his friends personally and was a massive giveaway to the working man!" (Even though 90% of benefits went to the top 1% and Trump&friends substantially benefited.) Then they'll proceed to repeat Trump's lies about how megacorps using all their tax savings on stock buybacks and virtually nothing on wages actually benefits the middle class and not the wealthy too. But those liberal liars can't be trusted because we caught them lying about the middle class actually receiving a pittance instead of nothing! So them lying proves we're not!

That they've convinced 80% of everyone that the false info, deliberate misleading, and overt bias is so pervasive even outside of Fox News/Breitbart that mainstream news in general can't be trusted is the ultimate 'fake news'.

PS: I went on a tear about SJWs and their 'white men are all racist/sexist!' schtick earlier today, so when you conservatives give me a '-1 The Truth Makes Me Angry!' mod on this post, how's about balancing out the '-1 The Truth Makes Me Angry!' mod the liberals will be giving me for that one ;)
Now I'm off to look for a thread talking about "centrists" to see if I can hit the trifecta of pissing off the entire political spectrum in one day.

Re:Modern examples

[mentil]

Automatically believing something that the left-wing AND right-wing biased outlets report on is still unwise, as it just means that outlets that lack critical reporting and are willing to publish regardless of truth merely have to agree to prioritize profits. It's commonplace that a white house press release will happen and all the publishers across the spectrum will report on it, even if it's blatant disinformation. Reporting "person X says Y" is technically factual, even if the reporter knows the content is bullshit. I expect newswires to do that, but any news outlet that editorializes should be more skeptical, and I'd only factor in the ones that are.

How about if, say, The Atlantic, BBC, Al Jazeera, and Christian Science Monitor all agree on something?

Re:Modern examples

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a 2 hour video of the Covington kids available SAME DAY

Re:Modern examples

[AmiMoJo]

if it's on all 4 major networks (Breitbart(*), Fox, CNN, MSNBC) then it's probably not fake.

Consensus is a shitty way of determining if news is fake or not. For a start it's not like all four of them will send a journalist to report on every story, for the most part they all pick up the AP or Reuters story and add their own spin.

A better option is to weight sources. The BBC is mostly reliable and can be relied on to publish corrections. If it's on Brietbart it's probably false. Then WAIT, don't leap to conclusions and start shit-posting instantly, and if it's important maybe do some research to better understand the story, and see how it develops over time. Stuff that is fake tends to get debunked fairly quickly, so all you really need to do is avoid being part of the mob that gets triggered by it.

Re:Modern examples

[Anonymous Coward]

The reality of situation is, yes absolutely the outlets like CNN and MSNBC etc have a liberal bias, but the degree of their bias, their intention to mislead, isn't in the same universe as Breitbart and Fox News (yes, some are, but the cable networks and giant print papers, no).

Are you fucking kidding me? Breitbart has an intention to lead, they are very biased, but their misleading is accidental because they don't have a good editor. The other news outlets lie their asses off every single day as a matter of policy. Here is a very small number of examples off the top of my head where the outlets like CNN and MSNBC fabricated news and reported the opposite of the truth:

• George Zimmerman was a NAACP volunteer who had campaigned against police brutality.
• The Palestinians are a terrorist organization whose founder advised Adolph Hitler to kill the Jews instead of using them for forced labor.
• The West Bank is Israeli land. All of that media whinging about The Occupation and Illegal Settlements is fake.
• Transgender is a quasireligious order founded in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2007 that is supported by Cynthia Rothschild, George Soros, the Rockefeller foundations, and the British Army Bureau of Psychological Warfare.
• Gamergate was a racketeering scandal that the FBI refused to prosecute because the people responsible were working for the White House and State Department. There was so little harassment of women that the FBI closed the case after interviewing three teenagers, one of whom was a friend of Brianna Wu. Meanwhile, US Government agents inside Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn gathered the identities of everyone discussing the scandal, convinced most of Silicon Valley to blacklist them from employment and industry conferences, and shipped their information to Qatar.
• That Catholic kid in the MAGA hat who was grinning nervously while someone he didn't know, who turned out to be a professional Indian, had walked up to him and was banging a drum in his face to try and cause a reaction, he literally did nothing but the media wanted him murdered.
• The Indian tribes called themselves Redskins, formally, during diplomacy, and there is nothing derogatory about the name.
• Donald Trump did business with Russia as an FBI sting operation, which means that the FBI officials who made up Russiagate to derail his presidency knew that he was an undercover agent.
• There are several White Genocide projects, we saw it happen in Rhodesia and South Africa and the American inner cities, it is not just a conspiracy theory but people have been caught conspiring to make it happen.
• That kid in Texas with the fake bomb was arrested because he committed a felony and the school was required by law to call the police on him. There was no racism involved. He did not invent a clock, he disassembled one.
• Pepe the Frog was the most popular meme on the Internet since AYBABTU when the media started claiming that everyone using it was a Nazi just so they could have an excuse to call Donald Trump Jr. a Nazi for posting a Pepe meme.

When presented with evidence that they are wrong, Breitbart will sometimes get around to fixing it. The reporters from the Big Three and CNN and MNSBC will insult whoever sent in the correction, we see them do it on Twitter, and they put pressure on social media organizations to develop algorithms to automatically block any independent media that might report different facts to the same story and any users who read independent media.

What's scary is that their disinformation is getting into the education system because "everybody" is reporting it except for those "fringe" independent websites that are

Re:Modern examples

[Uberbah]

Automatically believing something that the left-wing AND right-wing biased outlets

100% of mainstream media outlets in the United States have a right wing bias. Yes, that includes MSDNC and National Pentagon Radio.

Re:Modern examples

[Kirth]

"Liberal" Bias? No. They're just more centrist.

It's like calling Hillary Clinton "Liberal", where she is clearly Authoritarian: https://www.politicalcompass.o...

Reaping what was sown

[malkavian]

Essentially, the education system has told a generation (or two now) that evidence doesnâ(TM)t matter. You donâ(TM)t have to be correct, rigorous or diligent in working out what the hell is going on; you just have to express yourself, be confident in your conviction and never let anyone tell you youâ(TM)re wrong. And in this pursuit of self affirmation, itâ(TM)s the worldâ(TM)s responsibility to keep you safe, no matter what you choose to do.
So, now we arrive at a position where pseudoscience is running rampant, people arenâ(TM)t equipped with the critical thinking skills to delve deep and discern fact from fiction and relevance from irrelevance, and thereâ(TM)s an overwhelming attitude of opinion being the gold standard, and if thatâ(TM)s dangerously flawed itâ(TM)s someone elseâ(TM)s job to protect them from any consequences so they donâ(TM)t need to change their opinion.
And now, again, itâ(TM)s âoeoutsourcing critical thinkingâ, conditioning people to believe even more that what they read must be true because an app hasnâ(TM)t flagged it as false.
Critical thinking though be core in education, and everyone should be taught to debate. How to build logical progressions (and just as important, how to build false ones, so you can better spot the tricks others use when trying to manipulate you). How to win and lose gracefully. And how to exercise that marvellous tool we have called a brain, rather than switching it off and just using the mouth.

Re:Reaping what was sown

[serviscope_minor]

Essentially, the education system has told a generation (or two now) that evidence doesna(TM)t matter. You dona(TM)t have to be correct, rigorous or diligent in working out what the hell is going on; you just have to express yourself, be confident in your conviction and never let anyone tell you youa(TM)re wrong.

I think you are looking at history through rose-tinted glasses. It's not like the 1950s, or the Victorian eras were the pinnacles of reason.

The Victorian approach to education for example was to declare "facts" which may or may not have been completely wrong and could well have been based on a fetishisation of Antiquity, then hit you with a stick until you parroted them.

Many of those "facts" survived a long time. Like the "fact" that the wheel is the greatest invention because there's no way that's an opinion or up for debate, and I seem to remember tht was in it's final muted death throes by the 1980s.

So, now we arrive at a position where pseudoscience is running rampant,

Is it more rampant than before? There's always been lots of pseudoscience.

people arena(TM)t equipped with the critical thinking skills to delve deep and discern fact from fiction and relevance from irrelevance, and therea(TM)s an overwhelming attitude of opinion being the gold standard,

I encourage you to read this story: http://central.gutenberg.org/a...

It covers that fairly thoroghly and provides a solid skewing of social media. except it's from 1909. I think we can take it from that that these concerns and so behaviours are not new.

Critical thinking though be core in education, and everyone should be taught to debate.

Critical thinking certainly should yes. Debating well people should be taught about debating, to spot rhetorical tricks certainly. Being able to debate live isn't necessary to be able ot dissect a transcript after and spot the holes. I think the latter is more important than the former.

Good point, and testable

[Okian Warrior]

Automatically believing something that the left-wing AND right-wing biased outlets report on is still unwise, as it just means that outlets that lack critical reporting and are willing to publish regardless of truth merely have to agree to prioritize profits.[...]

How about if, say, The Atlantic, BBC, Al Jazeera, and Christian Science Monitor all agree on something?

That's a very good point.

It would seem that Scott's idea is testable. Perhaps instead of using the top 4 networks, the idea should be studied over the course of a few months using all the major networks, and see if a combination - *any* combination - works as a fake news filter.

It shouldn't be too hard to find, in retrospect, blatant mistakes like the Covington students, and then see which outlets got it right.

Re:Good point, and testable

[kenai_alpenglow]

"Blatant video editing" != "Blatant mistakes". Any one (with a neutral mind) would have not come up with the reported conclusion if they had seen the entire video. And responsible reporting would have watched the entire video.

Leave Facebook, Twitter, and Google

[Rick Schumann]

Problem solved.
So-called 'social media' is CANCEROUS to our society. Get it out of your lives and profit thereby.

Re: The EU is full of greed.

[Luckyo]

We are in agreement. The only thing to add is that this is one of the countless cases where "side product" is more important than the core one.

They learned their lesson after Iraq

[Uberbah]

The Bush Administration made very specific claims about Iraq that could be falsified, eventually. With Russiagate, it's a bunch of Gish Gallop bullshit that sees it's True Believers hop back and forth between debunked talking points, like climate changers. Put the high priests of Russiagate on the spot and they quickly lose their shit when pressed. Adam Schitt loses his shit when asked to look into the camera and say, on the record, that Russia was behind the phishing of the Podesta emails.