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The central issue of Trumpism is that even if you did show him the birth certificate, he’d say it was a forgery.
Not trusting institutions and facts are how people become radicalized.
When you lose this fidelity in facts and institutions producing them you replace it with a propagandist organ to fill the void.
This organ will align succinctly with your confirmation bias to ill design. Propaganda has a purpose, in this case far-right seeks division.
Requesting individuals to question motives and fact checking sources is useless for someone so brain washed. They wholeheartedly believe.
You know, I don’t buy into religion, but if religion is a lens of viewing the world, Fox News is another, albeit a warped one.
But the story of the snake in the garden bears reminding. Some early Christians venerated the snake, they were called Ophites (🐍 worshipers)
Ophites venerated snakes because the Snake gave Knowledge.
Knowledge is power.
This brings us back to propaganda. The danger that God was trying to protect the world from was the danger of misinformation.
This is in of itself a form of censorship, but I’ll let @TheGoodGodAbove get a pass being omnivorous, omniscient, and omnipotent.
Knowledge can indeed be powerful but the implementation of pseudo-knowledge can deal a far deadlier blow. Isn’t that right Putin?
The way that Fox News reports the facts are telling as a propagandist organ and not a reputable informer of news.
This is inherently problematic as many people falsely believe what they hear on newsertainment as truth. But it’s not matching with reality.
How do we bridge the gap as #infoscientists ?
Our society needs to restrain people from accessing false information without becoming authoritarian and remaining free.
Our society consumes media at an alarming rate, with the news cycle seemingly shrinking at an alarming rate.
Alex Jones was right about one thing in the title of his program: InfoWars. That is our reality.
So we are in the trenches here, and things seem pretty rough with an apocalyptic epistemological end being nigh and all 👇🏽
So how do we combat it? Do we go the way of NK and SK? Can there only be one? The divide is so sharp that historians are speculating 👇🏽
A civil war would not look like a very inviting scenario.
So my solution if I may be so bold is two fold. Education and information management.
Education: we must teach our youth and enable programs for adults to learn how to weigh sources and look at bias inherent in writing.
Most importantly we must examine the bias that is inherent within ourselves.
Information management is the trickier of the two.
This goes back to the ethics of curbing the spread of fake news.
If facebook can write algorithms to stop the spread of sources of misinformation, it enables facebook to be powerful indeed.
like all weapons, a knowledge weapon could assist in the spread of information and can cause them to become viral on purpose...
So in conjunction with social media actively managing a system that gives news organizations weights in their algorithms...
we would need a way to digitally weigh the credibility, and this would come in the form of an independent committee of experts that examine
the body of work over a period of time of an organization seeking a weight.
This weight would be updated, like a license, and would weigh the objective portrayal of reality by the seeking organization.
These weights would thus be feed into the algorithms of social media.
The individuals of the committee would be required to demonstrate the ability to understand bias and fact checking.
Which they would have assuredly learned while in school.
