The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News

[The Brain]

People who are already eating up the bullshit are not going to care about any stinkin' badges.

They'll care about these badges signifying tellers of truths They don't want you to know.

[Josquius]

The only place where I feel there is hope is that this infection seems to have taken strongest hold with people of a certain age and the younger the person the more they are generally able to understand the existence of this kind of nonsense.
Are todays teenagers, who have grown up in a world where this stuff is normal, immune to it?
Are we just waiting for the old to die before we can return to a world that works on fact?

There needs to be a reputation score on Twitter.  If you share a story that later turns out to be fake, you get one moron point.  If you collect enough, you get a badge to signify your achievement in the field of uncritical thinking.

The trouble there is the Russian government and their allies will set their people to work actively downvoting facts that go against their line whilst promoting the truthiness of nonsense.

[DGuller]

That requires someone judging whether the story is "fake" or not. Not always clear cut.

There are already systems used by Facebook or Google to officially designate something as fake news.  Problem is that by the time the fakeness is confirmed, impressions are made and no one gives a flying fuck about fact checking. 

If you got a memento to keep reminding you of hour gullibility, then maybe on the margins it'll make you think twice.  Not everyone who shares fake news is an unsalvageable vegetable, some are just people who are slow to turn on critical thinking.

[The Minsky Moment]

That is one way to frame the issue. I fear shouting loudly that expertise is good is not going to rescue it from those threats. Or rather, we may end up rescuing it at the cost of increasing the sense of alienation and disenfranchisement.

The people that are talking about the value of expertise are not the ones who are shouting loudly.   And the people who are shouting loudly don't care much about the viability of democracy in any event.

I don't accept the idea that regular folks become "alienated" at the prospect that (say) the Secretary of Energy has some substantive knowledge of energy policy or that the President receive and review national security briefings from people who know stuff about national security.  In fact I think there is still a safe majority of Americans that think that this a good idea.

For all the anti-intellectual rhetoric thrown about in the GOP news bubble, the fact is that Americans keep sending their kids to college in every greater numbers and place an ever increasing value on a good university education.

[Oexmelin]

I don't accept the idea that regular folks become "alienated" at the prospect that (say) the Secretary of Energy has some substantive knowledge of energy policy or that the President receive and review national security briefings from people who know stuff about national security.  In fact I think there is still a safe majority of Americans that think that this a good idea.

Except that is never how these issues are framed, isn't it? Conducting a poll about whether or not it's a good idea that someone in a position of authority knows what he is talking about will reliably return that safe majority. Republicans don't claim they don't know: they claim they know better. The issue is how that knowledge will be acquired (killer instincts!), and above all, what *ought* to be done with it - and this leads us back to, to borrow Dewey's phrase, the "problem of the public". Who ought to judge on that *ought*? Who gets to decide what to do about climate change?

I venture that it's not so much knowledge that is challenged, than expertise - the relationship of power that is built within having access to power (and rewards) through knowledge. In other words, Americans want their kids to be those experts, not because knowledge is good, but because certifications, diplomas, etc. have been built into the bureaucratized culture of the white collar labor market. *There*, expertise is valued, but the corporate model is far from democratic... Whether or not this amount to a "good education", is open for debate.  The decline of the humanities speaks volume about the sort of education that is valued.

[The Minsky Moment]

. Republicans don't claim they don't know: they claim they know better. The issue is how that knowledge will be acquired (killer instincts!), and above all, what *ought* to be done with it - and this leads us back to, to borrow Dewey's phrase, the "problem of the public". Who ought to judge on that *ought*? Who gets to decide what to do about climate change?

On climate change, Republican skeptics don't claim to know better, they declare the problem to be inherently unknowable and then falsely (and at the highest levels, knowingly) accuse their opponents of fraud.  There is an entire mass media apparatus that is deployed in systematic acts of deliberate deception.  This isn't the kind of problem that Dewey was concerned with - how to keep a sense of community and democratic autonomy in the face of the need for bureaucratic regularity and expertise in a complex, knowledge-based industrial society.  Trump's torchlight rallies and Fox's "personality news" shows aren't a last ditch effort of authentic communal expression in the face of stultifying bureaucracy; it's crass propaganda straight from the school of Goebbels.  Expertise is attacked precisely because it is delivered by people who have expertise, because those people are not the right sort of people. Not "real Americans."

[Oexmelin]

This isn't the kind of problem that Dewey was concerned with - how to keep a sense of community and democratic autonomy in the face of the need for bureaucratic regularity and expertise in a complex, knowledge-based industrial society.

I disagree strongly that this is not the sort of problem Dewey was concerned with. We mostly failed to heed his warnings. Expertise is never a substitute for politics. Now, we have to deal with this cancerous backlash. If democracy is an ethos, then it's been weakened enough so that authoritarianism is making such a strong comeback, and we should be concerned about the cause.  Right-sort of people vs Wrong-sort of people is a way to get a grip over discourses that shut out people for a while. Sure, it's powerfully instrumentalized by propaganda, and cynically manipulated by a bunch of people who, very expertly, exploit loopholes and voids. But it resonated with something much, much larger than the American context, or else we would not witness the same sorts of tension in most liberal democracies. Either we think this is merely conjectural, and that we should fight to go back to "the time before", or we think this is somehow systemic, and that we ought to investigate the causes of such a receptivity for this message.

[dps]

For all the anti-intellectual rhetoric thrown about in the GOP news bubble, the fact is that Americans keep sending their kids to college in every greater numbers and place an ever increasing value on a good university education.

A university degree is no guarantee that one is capable of critical thinking.

[Josquius]

Going to university is more about getting the bit of paper that serves as a license for most decent paying jobs than actually learning anything.