Comment by sunshine-o
5 months ago
I still remember the time before the Internet, I can assure you the world was full of disinformation and misinformation, I believe way more than today.
Everywhere, in schools, in cafes, the bus stop people would tell you crazy things and people would argue about whether it is true or not. If you really wanted to settle it you would need to find an encyclopedia, but most of the time you would need to go to a public library and find a book or go through microfilms for hours, make a copy and show it to everybody to fight disinformation.
Depending on the country, the government had a tight or tighter control on what was in that library.
Some country would also tightly control what was said in a bar or cafe like in East Germany.
So thinking we are in a life threatening misinformation epidemic is just false if you compare to just a few decades ago.
Yes, it was harder to prove or disprove a claim when information was not as readily accessible as it is today. For the same reason, the likelihood of even becoming aware of any "fringe theories" without digital communication was much lower. So, overall I would say they are more pervasive today.
Yeah I agree. Its much easier to disseminate false information in the digital age, because if you have the means, you can drown out the true information in a way that's much harder to detect. I don't think this is an oranges to oranges comparison.
Yeah, and remember when some adults (otherwise normal people) argued that they had seen UFO's?
They argued that they had seen a flying object that they were unable to identify? Is there a counter argument to this?
Kind of harmless conspiracy compared to many of the current ones.
There were plenty of Dale Gribbles in the world before social media. Movies and books were full of conspiracy stuff (see "Enemy of the State" from 1998), and the public believed lots of them to varying degrees. Overreacting to that by using government to silence/control them would surely only generate legions more and give them easy legitimacy as victims.
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It would be interesting to measure it, but look at things like vaccination rates, which have gone down, and the willingness to support political candidates and news sources who embrace disinformation, which has gone way up - whatever you think of Trump and the modern GOP, they are much different than their predecessors. Maybe now people are more convinced of disnformation or otherwise willing to act on it.
"not as easily accessible information" and "disinformation" are two different things
> Everywhere, in schools, in cafes, the bus stop people would tell you crazy things
Where and when is this supposed to be?
Even taking that at face value, at MOST every living person could be talking about one crazy thing at the same time, and then there would be nobody to listen. Or half of them could talk, the other half would listen. With the internet and bots, there is no upper limit. For every person, there can be 50 trillion bots chirping at them.
> So thinking we are in a life threatening misinformation epidemic is just false if you compare to just a few decades ago.
Is this supposed to be an argument against researching it over taking your word for a world where everybody was telling everybody else crazy things all the time? If there is no problem, then all the less reason to be coy with the data, right?