Comment by mdnahas
5 days ago
My definition of a cult is a group where members don’t trust people outside the group. We have a lot of news sources saying that we should not trust other news sources. Especially statements like “that other news source lied once, so you should never trust them.” I think this promoted mistrust has created a lot of cults.
When members of a cult don’t trust outsiders, it allows their beliefs to drift away from reality. They’re not getting the feedback necessary to keep information grounded. And reality is a great mechanism for keeping beliefs unified. The creation of cults has splintered the USA.
I think the Internet has helped foster this. It made it cheaper and easier to create a new news source. It is cheaper and easier to fund that news source through ads or direct payments from customers. And the resulting market incentivizes news sources to keep customers by denigrating the competition, which creates cults.
We need to redesign the market for news sources, to disincentivize that behavior.
I think this is not quite right.
There are news, and there's entertainment (opinions and punditry).
News actually have journalistic standards. They try to stay truthful and retract errors.
But what most people follow are shows/personalities that aren't even allowed to be officially called news, and independent media online influencers who are much more easily and directly corruptible and audience captured by much less money, with basically zero accountability.
The truth is, mainstream news (the actual news) are still good. But it's so easy nowadays to get on a platform and discredit everyone with almost no evidence, and have thousands of people believe you. And then sell your sponsors to that audience, because you sound trustworthy. It's so much easier to discredit everyone else than to build your own true credibility.
The goal is not to make you believe that "we are better than them". The goal is to make you believe that "everyone is equally bad, everyone is lying to you". It's like when phone scammers tell you that the other phone scammers are real scammers to appear more trustworthy.
I think the problem is with independent media and "opinions" replacing news. If everyone yells bullshit for personal gain at the top of their lungs and creates cults (as I agree these become), that's basically not free speech anymore.