’Belonging Is Stronger Than Facts’: The Age of Misinformation
Social and psychological forces are combining to make the sharing and believing of misinformation an endemic problem with no easy solution.
... Framing everything as a grand conflict against scheming enemies can feel enormously reassuring. And that’s why perhaps the greatest culprit of our era of misinformation may be, more than any one particular misinformer, the era-defining rise in social polarization.
“At the mass level, greater partisan divisions in social identity are generating intense hostility toward opposition partisans,” which has “seemingly increased the political system’s vulnerability to partisan misinformation,” Dr. Nyhan wrote in an earlier paper.
Growing hostility between the two halves of America feeds social distrust, which makes people more prone to rumor and falsehood. It also makes people cling much more tightly to their partisan identities. And once our brains switch into “identity-based conflict” mode, we become desperately hungry for information that will affirm that sense of us versus them, and much less concerned about things like truth or accuracy...
... “The problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone,” the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in a much-circulated MIT Technology Review article. “It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.”
In an ecosystem where that sense of identity conflict is all-consuming, she wrote, “belonging is stronger than facts.”
I don’t really think there is a solution that can be manufactured, but I also think the solution is going to happen naturally as people sort of “wake up” as awareness and sensitivity to the toxicity of social media rises.
Just from my own experience on social media, there’s definitely a slowly forming left wing counter-culture that is rejecting the hyper-partisan, over reactive nonsense, still holding the same values, but disputing the notion that every criticism is some sort of assault on identity and holding open conversation at higher value.
Of course, who knows where that goes. I think a lot of the team-sports stuff is falling quickly out of favour with younger people who are more aware and internet-savvy than older people who are not are so deep into it they can’t see it play out.
In general, I think culture is self-healing, the pendulum swings but humanity does a good job of self-regulating over time. It’s why future predictions of some cultural movement continuing on unchecked until it completely takes over and becomes worst case scenario just never seem to come true.
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I don’t really think there is a solution that can be manufactured, but I also think the solution is going to happen naturally as people sort of “wake up” as awareness and sensitivity to the toxicity of social media rises.
Just from my own experience on social media, there’s definitely a slowly forming left wing counter-culture that is rejecting the hyper-partisan, over reactive nonsense, still holding the same values, but disputing the notion that every criticism is some sort of assault on identity and holding open conversation at higher value.
I think I'd agree with this. Gen Z seems to be rapidly rejecting the id-pol stuff that was so popular among millennials a few years ago in favour of more class-based politics.
You could also kind of see it in the last U.S. election with how big of an age gap there was in support for Biden vs. Bernie.
Anyways, here's a compilation of Dave Rubin being a complete idiot if you need a laugh today.
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I used to really like Dave Rubin. Did he ever fall into the grift over the last few years though. Completely going against everything he used to talk about for views. Disappointing.
She really isn't, but if you go on Shapiro's show I guess you become far right by osmosis. She does align with some of those right-wing populists on being a vocal critic of identity politics and IIRC wrote a bunch of stuff maligning the culture at the NY Times as being oppressively "woke".
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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She really isn't, but if you go on Shapiro's show I guess you become far right by osmosis. She does align with some of those right-wing populists on being a vocal critic of identity politics and IIRC wrote a bunch of stuff maligning the culture at the NY Times as being oppressively "woke".
The culture of the New York Times is oppressively woke.
And identity politics certainly seems to be used as a cudgel whereby anyone who doesn’t subscribe to every aspect of it can be driven from public life guilt-free because they’re a racist/homophobe/transphobic/privileged etc, rather than any movement that actually protects the rights/safety of the populace.
A woke mob can cyber bully a trans woman who opened for Dave Chapelle to death on Twitter, but make Dave Chapelle the bad guy because he told some jokes.
That doesn’t seem particularly virtuous to me, but I could be wrong. Surely there are some people do deserve to be cyber bullied to the point of suicide.
__________________ ”I wish none of this had happened.”
“So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”
Rowan Roy - February 15, 2024
Johnny Gaudreau - August 13 1993 - August 29, 2024
Matthew Gaudreau - December 5, 1994 - August 29, 2024
