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> in the same way the internet and smart phones have

I think the jury is very much still out on that one. I just got on Facebook for the first time in almost 10 years, and the comments on 'suggested' content have made me seriously question whether society was ready for these technologies. The corrosive impact of the falsehoods that are being thrown around has only begun to take effect.



People have always thrown around corrosive falsehoods like you wouldn't believe. At least modern social networks also let others spread corrections and counteractions to common myths and bullshit political beliefs.

I'd love to see some modern polyannas about "misinformation" hop into a time machine and then spend even a few days talking to any average group of people about their general beliefs in the mid 20th century on downard, or just take a look at the kind of utter invented garbage and hyperbole that was constantly peddled and regularly sold to wide swathes of the public by government and media organizations of all kinds so much more easily in previos decades and centuries.

Humans love to invent stories based on tribal notions and biases, so falsehoods never go away even in the most advanced communication age in human history, but historically, we're not doing so bad, simply because the cost of spreading any idea is now lower than ever previously and the means for doing so are more widely available than they've ever been, letting things average out much more rapidly towards message dilution. Anything in the opposite direction, and any centralized "vigilance" of supposed wrong ideas will only take us back to a place where a small number control more narrative than they ever should, and that small number will always tend towards dictating based on selfish interest.




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