Good list, but the problem is you are preaching to the choir. It doesn’t matter what we think. A huge swath of the population will watch/read fake news and repost it. Even very smart people I know post fake news — because everybody likes to bitch on social media and get attention, often talking about things they don’t understand. I also see really smart people posting things like “A random guy at the bar next to me is a racists and then they start spewing his hate claiming to be against it”. If you were against it, you would ignore him, instead of making this about you. (It only makes sense to say something if this person has influence).
Smart people also like to post incredibly biased articles, while not fake, completely miss the story. An simple example (which goes back a ways, but illustrates the point) is the Fukashima reactor — I don’t remember seeing a single story about how old that reactor was and how this wouldn’t have happened with new technology — all the articles are basically tell us that nuclear energy is just simply bad — and then all of the reactors in Germany are shut down without any discussion. The oil Industry loved that. (And no, renewables can’t just suddenly accommodate all that load).
Also if 17% of Americans don’t trust Washington, then why is abortion such a big issue, when any intelligent person should know that this is a wedge issue to get votes. The percentage of Americans that are considered evangelical is somewhere between 7% and 40% (I haven’t dove into the where the various bits of data come from and why the big range). They will listen to anybody who claims they are for Jesus. Take a criminal and slap a Jesus sticker on him, and presto….he/she has just donned a superhero costume, and let’s vote for him/her, because she’s wants to save babies from evil women. That they are a tool of Wallstreet, or a racist, or colluding with major criminals, is irrelevant, we want to protect babies, always, no exceptions, even when a woman is raped.
We are dealing with several problems:
- Americans are tribal, emotional, looking for attention, and are so addicted to drama they like to consume and regurgitate junk, no matter where it comes from. Maybe decades of watching a regular diet of reality TV and idiotic sitcoms powered by extremely manipulative advertising, often directed at young children has something to do with this.
- Our government is driven by money and thus run by idiot savants.
Pretty much nobody in power knows how to deal with this problem or has any incentive to properly do anything about it. Take our next big threat, Deepfake videos. People are going to consume these in mass — they won’t know they’re fake, and they certainly aren’t going to follow recommended procedures to only consider videos from trusted sources (e.g. like going directly to a major reputable news outlet like BBC, or whomever and then cross checking it with another reputable outlet — OR only considering videos on YouTube that come directly from for example the BBC channel on YouTube, hoping of course that there isn’t another channel with a similar name). Congress is debating how to deal with Deepfake videos, and they are getting suckered into considering various technologies, which will make them look good, and provide $ to certain vendors (who use big lobbyists), but are too complex to solve the problem. They aren’t considering other solutions like forcing social media companies to verify videos with digital signatures and prominently display what is fake and what is not. That would require somebody to actually understand a very complex issues, and then how to deploy it en mass (e.g. We would need trusted Certificate Authorities), and then have the political wherewithal to force this upon the social media ecosystem, and of course the lobbyists from the social media companies will ensure this will never happen by confusing the politicians who don’t know the first thing about this, because all most politicians really are, are fundraising experts. I know, I’ve worked closely with many of them and their aids.
So how do we educate a population that is this far down the path to insanity? I don’t think we can. Our only hope to is maybe educate children, but the school system (driven by money and power) has their claws in them already. I’m doing my part my writing and performing music. I already tried the activist (disorganized) and lobbyist path (infected with money), and that was hopeless . I can’t think of anything else.
