Most of the population does not pay attention to news except for the Cardashians. 🤣

Jorpho wrote:

shamino wrote:

Democracy requires unfiltered access to information

It's worked as well as can be expected up until now, it seems.

...because what happened now?

quality content that people will buy

Shaky correlation there between those two qualifiers. 😁

VileRancour wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

shamino wrote:

Democracy requires unfiltered access to information

It's worked as well as can be expected up until now, it seems.

...because what happened now?

"Unfiltered access to information" happened. It's easier than ever before to find any kook spouting any particular nonsense you might want to hear.

Jorpho wrote:

VileRancour wrote:

...because what happened now?

"Unfiltered access to information" happened. It's easier than ever before to find any kook spouting any particular nonsense you might want to hear.

so if i said the workings of society and information flow are being worked better and better by some who dont want to be seen youd call it bs?

If I can't see the "some who dont want to be seen", how should I know what they may or may not be doing? Maybe they are, maybe they aren't.

Jorpho wrote:

and in turn requires that the individual do their own filtering and research and make their own judgment of a source's credibility.

It is easy to decide that an old man yelling from his porch is probably less credible than a national newspaper, whose continued existence relies on being able to produce quality content that people will buy (and that advertisers will advertise in). The problem is that on the Internet, the old man yelling from his porch can feasibly design a website that looks just as credible.

Sure, but that's a learning process. Some web sites have or will attain more credibility with the public than others, with unknowns being met with the most skepticism. But even the much less credible sites serve a purpose in the big picture as they flail around on the fringes of popularly accepted "truth". 😀 My contention is that the evaluation of a news source's credibility cannot be trusted in the hands of anyone, it has to be left to the individual. Individual biases will balance out in the overall population, but large institutional bias is not so easily countered.

The greater the degree to which information is filtered in some manner, the greater the degree to which people are prone to believe what they read. In the liberal case, where people are exposed to a wide variety of ideas/stories with no filtering of what they see, people will adopt more skepticism of what they read while still being exposed to a broader range of ideas. I think the latter is healthier and ultimately more empowering to the people of a society.
The internet has caused a rapid transition to the more liberal scenario, so some people's tendency to critique what they read may lag behind but it will adapt. We on here have a lot more experience with the internet than most, but for many people the internet didn't become a fixture of their daily lives until they started using it to talk to friends on Facebook in the last few years.

Well, perhaps an organization like Google could add a function like Safesearch for news. Use it if you want, disable it if you don't want Infowars filtered out. Maybe even a scale could be arranged so you can tune your level of wackiness.

shamino wrote:

Sure, but that's a learning process. Some web sites have or will attain more credibility with the public than others, with unknowns being met with the most skepticism. But even the much less credible sites serve a purpose in the big picture as they flail around on the fringes of popularly accepted "truth". 😀 My contention is that the evaluation of a news source's credibility cannot be trusted in the hands of anyone, it has to be left to the individual. Individual biases will balance out in the overall population, but large institutional bias is not so easily countered.

The greater the degree to which information is filtered in some manner, the greater the degree to which people are prone to believe what they read. In the liberal case, where people are exposed to a wide variety of ideas/stories with no filtering of what they see, people will adopt more skepticism of what they read while still being exposed to a broader range of ideas. I think the latter is healthier and ultimately more empowering to the people of a society.

But that's my point: people aren't "exposed to a wide variety of ideas/stories with no filtering". People will naturally gravitate towards sources that already agree with their preconceived worldview and only develop skepticism towards things they don't agree with. You say "individual biases will balance out", but there is no "balancing" – there is only increased polarization.

Why shouldn't there be "large institutional bias", at least to some extent? A person who has devoted multiple years life to the intensive study of a subject will probably be better informed about the subject than I am, and claims that the person's knowledge is somehow invalid due to "bias" do not somehow put my opinion on equal footing.

Someone elsewhere commented that the internet now is like Europe in the immediate aftermath of Gutenberg's invention of printing. Previously control of education and news propagation was in the hands of monks and princes. Now suddenly everybody was able to say what they wanted without restriction. The consequences were dramatic.