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Ask HN: How do you deal with lies on the internet?

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41–50 of 126 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with lies on the internet?

#41
Realize that one's truth is one's observation.

So from this, you can have X's truth being based to a certain degree on Y's statement, which may be his(Y's, that is) actual observation or a relayed observation from another person, say Z.

By observing different opinions carefully and in good will you can map and sort of create a tree of observations.The closer you want to get to the actual truth, the closer you would want to get to the leafs of the tree.(Obviously you always have to keep a reference of the thing you want to know, otherwise you get into detailed observations that don't answer your question).

Now obviously the actual issue is when one's legitimate observation is misrepresented as truth, even in good will, by that person.Therefore, there's no best strategy because you need to focus on both depth and collecting a breadth of observations/statements.Think of it as a multipartite graph(in the case of "objective" truth), or a tree(this would be more akin to pure subjective observations).

Ignorance is "fine" as long as you don't claim the truth.Also pay attention to people claiming to know the absolutes or authoritative fact-checkers, most wise people never claim to know much of anything besides their own observations.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with lies on the internet?

#42

I'm an American, living in the US, and for situations like Ukraine specifically, I don't believe anything right away. War is chaotic, and social media makes it more so. It costs me nothing to reserve judgement, because nothing depends on me except that I might accidentally share false info. Better to stay quiet, think, and wait. The truth may come out eventually. No one cares if I personally think it's true, but ther…

That sums it up for me.

I remember, a number of years ago, an Australian eMag, called Crikey, did a series on "Half of all news is spin"[0-1].

I doubt things have improved with age.

[0] https://www.crikey.com.au/topic/spinning-the-media/

[1] https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/03/18/spinning-the-media-repo...

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with lies on the internet?

#43

This Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events It’s not perfect, but Wikipedia does a good job of being neutral and sticking with facts. On forums like HN, Facebook and Reddit, I rarely bother with correcting people. The sites are not tailored towards factual information, they’re tailored towards engagement. And dis-information is more engaging (people argue about it) than straight facts.

RSS feed to it: https://www.to-rss.xyz/wikipedia/current_events/

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with lies on the internet?

#44

I'm an American, living in the US, and for situations like Ukraine specifically, I don't believe anything right away. War is chaotic, and social media makes it more so. It costs me nothing to reserve judgement, because nothing depends on me except that I might accidentally share false info. Better to stay quiet, think, and wait. The truth may come out eventually. No one cares if I personally think it's true, but ther…

There’s also the feel of being played and deceived when something you had strong emotional reaction (i.e. Ukrainian father saying goodbye to his daughters) turns out to be propaganda and part of information warfare.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with lies on the internet?

#45

I'm an American, living in the US, and for situations like Ukraine specifically, I don't believe anything right away. War is chaotic, and social media makes it more so. It costs me nothing to reserve judgement, because nothing depends on me except that I might accidentally share false info. Better to stay quiet, think, and wait. The truth may come out eventually. No one cares if I personally think it's true, but ther…

Speaking of social media usefulness, but unrelated, but I found it strange/funny/sad/depressing, I signed up last night on Twitter and one of the posts about Ukraine at the top was like "Like for Zelensky, RT for Putin, who do you prefer" With some thousands interactions Does humanity really need social media? Why politicians keep posting their communications there, why they feel they need to expose citizens to such…

Twitter is also a source of claims that civilian objects are out of bounds for the conflict. Well it proved to be an evidence of not being the case.

RT / Like is a blatant manipulation and Twitter should ban it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with lies on the internet?

#46
post #44

I'm an American, living in the US, and for situations like Ukraine specifically, I don't believe anything right away. War is chaotic, and social media makes it more so. It costs me nothing to reserve judgement, because nothing depends on me except that I might accidentally share false info. Better to stay quiet, think, and wait. The truth may come out eventually. No one cares if I personally think it's true, but ther…

There’s also the feel of being played and deceived when something you had strong emotional reaction (i.e. Ukrainian father saying goodbye to his daughters) turns out to be propaganda and part of information warfare.

Absolutely, that one specifically got me. Didn't that turn out to be a Russian soldier or something? Regardless, the firehose of social media content isn't tuned for accuracy, it's tuned for volume.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with lies on the internet?

#49
post #34
post #32

For the Ukraine war: also do not trust any information sources. Even the good guys are lying. I've been watching foreign news (Sky News, while I'm American), to avoid both our own biases, and the inevitable chatter about American politics. Sky isn't perfect, but at least if they're being deceptive, it probably won't be targeted at me. I also like the Reddit live thread and a Twitter account @EnglishUkraine, keeping i…

I don't know if that is the same SkyNews that we have here but if it is I would avoid it like the plague. It's effectively our version of Fox News. If you want something non-biased (from Australia that is) then ABC News or SBS World News is as close as you are going to get. Both are funded explicitly in a way that avoids biases (but also why our government has been trying to take said funding away...).

No way is SkyNews as partisan as Fox.

You'd never see someone like Sam Coates for example on Fox. And he's not the only one.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with lies on the internet?

#50
I find getting off social media is a massive help. Delete it, chances are you will find it has been a net negative for most of the time you have been using it.

Don't pay too much attention to headlines, most of the time they are misleading, discount any articles with “sources say”, “experts say”, all of that nonsense. Only pay attention to actual sources that you can verify.

Always check the sources once found, don't take anyone's word for it. In this instance it might be worth watching the countries' leader's speeches in full, from Putin, to Zelenskyy.

Sit back, and wait (unless you're actually in the middle of the conflict, in which case you won't need the news to tell you). Most things take weeks, if not months, and years to come out.

Use critical thinking to process things, and remember if it's in the news it's likely completely unique, and won't affect your real life anyway.

If war is coming to your country you will know without switching the telly on, if there is a pandemic you will know because many people will be dropping all around you.

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