[Fuzz]

Justin Ling wrote a good piece recently, "We Lost the Battle Against Misinformation".

Plenty of smart people acknowledge this reality and yet remain awfully sure that, with the right combination of grit, technology, and institutional buy-in, we can put an end to the scourge of fake news, misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories — whatever you want to call it.

But this year’s pick from Merriam-Webster — “slop” — should be an indication that we have melted into a bubbling tar pit of nonsense, fakery, and bull####. There is no amount of fact-checking, media literacy, or platform moderation to solve the extent of this problem. No volume of good journalism or education campaigns will unscrewup our toxic information ecosystem.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I’m here to wave the white flag. We’ve lost the battle against misinformation.
And maybe that’s okay.

Unfortunately I don't think his conclusion is all that helpful. Essentially having the people dependent on the machine for interaction to also choose to abandon that, and for media consumers to, I dunno, just become more discerning? End users will never be the driving force of change when they are victims of the system themselves. Sorry Justin, this is not really an out.

I think if any of us were given the power to return newspapers, academics, doctors, and experts back to their central role of arbiters of truth, we’d do it in an instant.

But there’s no way to do that, unless we do a bit of information devolution. We need media outlets, politicians, organizations, and institutions who are more and more willing to engage with people offline — or, at least, far away from the toxic information systems on which they remain.

We need to go on an informational diet. We need to become more discerning with what we want to know, and what we need to know.

Because there is still a war to fight. And the only way to win the next battle, and the one after that, is if we stop fighting on the unreal fields of the oligarch-and-despot-dominated internet.

https://www.bugeyedandshameless.com/...misinformation