A Key Reason Why Our Society Is Polluted With Misinformation Today

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

I was working on some homework today with my daughter who’s in 2nd grade. It came after a couple of days of trying to figure out how smart people are so effectively fooled by misinformation, and don’t see the threat of massive misinformation networks (i.e., X, Facebook, etc.). The homework was explaining what primary sources are, and included in that was an explanation of how people used to write letters and news used to come from newspapers.

There are several reasons why we are swamped with misinformation today. There are algorithms designed to highlight crazy content, we live in a globalized world and nefarious actors try to mess with other countries and cause disruption on certain topics, and people are inclined to believe wild conspiracy theories. However, there’s a fundamental change in society that is also a big part of the problem.

We are able to write and share ridiculously more words than ever before. On the surface, that seemed good. The more information, the better! We won’t just be enlightened, we’ll be super-enlightened! Well … that’s not actually perfect logic. In fact, it’s really, really bad logic. Don’t worry if you fully believed that argument — I think most of us did in the 1990s, and even more recently. The problem is, the more you have of something, the less you value it; and the easier something is to do, the less effort you put into it.

Being able to post stuff all day long, people are less careful about what they are posting. (Side note: I heard in a video today that Elon Musk had tweeted 200 times in the past 24 hours — and it seems like that’s approximately his norm these days.) When you had to type something on a typewriter, you were very careful about what you were typing. You took time to think about it fully, and consider whether there were any errors or flaws in what you were typing. When people had to chisel messages in stone, did they carelessly chisel whatever came into their mind at the moment? Okay, maybe we’re going back a little too far here — it’s hard to relate to that.

But what’s this got to do with misinformation? Well, we are talking about social media. It’s in the name. We’re talking about socially created and spread news. Traditionally, news organizations had strict policies for the quality of sources, whether sources were primary (the topic of my daughter’s homework) or secondary (or worse), the number of sources that were needed, and what could reasonably be printed. What policies on these matters do we each have as individuals when we repost/spread brief statements across Facebook, X, etc.? What kind of vetting and fact checking goes into the content that goes “viral” on social media? Viral indeed….

We do not value enough what we are willing to upvote, heart, and share. As long as it sounds good, or is catchy, why not spread it? Does it confirm what we already felt? Does it come from someone we like? Do I really need to spend time confirming that it’s true before I share it and scroll to the next post that might entertain my brain?

It’s very disappointing to see so many people fall for misinformation. It seems like the United States is now crumbling under the weight of misinformation that has put Donald Trump into the White House (twice), and all that has unleashed. The pillars of our democracy are disintegrating, all because of the power of misleading, misinforming, “citizen” media.

We are far past the Age of Enlightenment. We are now in the Age of Idiocracy.

Featured image by Ervin Gjata from Pixabay