The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

100% this. AFAICT, part of where this is coming from is formal debate style, where (IMHO) there's a subtle pressure to address everything the other side said. But in a conversation, you don't have to do that. You can pick up just the parts you want to reply to.

Secondly: "The internet makes me better informed". This is his perspective. Many people are not actively looking for information outside of their own biases. Thirdly: "Cranks often know a lot"... Should be titled "Cranks often think they know a lot". Just because someone can state a fact does not mean they are sufficiently educated to analyze that fact. Saying that there are "vaccine side-effects" (stated in the article) does not mean that Joe Rogan is able to weight the information in totality with other information from the studies. After this, the article got into a bunch of "whataboutism" and doesn't really compel me to believe that misinformation is not a problem. I agree with polarization getting worse, but could that be a symptom/signal of misinformation, is there a cause/effect relationship?

My thoughts:

There are multiple categories of false information spreading on the internet right now. I honestly believe that there is manipulation of the public happening on all sides of this problem, the thing that is still unclear is whether there is a coordinated source of this manipulation or if it is organic.

I disagree pretty strongly with the "misinformation problem" being misinformation. Anecdotally (yes, I know it's not scientific but it is the same information the author is giving) the amount of things shared on social media that are demonstrably wrong has increased over the past couple of years. There are people who truly believe that Trump was going to rally the military on January 20th or whatever date to "take back the white house". This got shared to numerous social media sites and was reposted that the "true president" was coming back. This is one explicit example, but similar things have been popping up for the past couple of years and spreading like wildfire. 5G vaccines, QAnon, flat earth, and many other fringe movements exist and ARE misinformation, the questions is how broad these movements are.

If you claim that misinformation is just "information that is partisan" or "wrongthink" I would urge you to dig further into some real, damaging examples. I think there are times when the term is weaponized, but there is a serious increase in how easy it is to spread words in this day and age. The internet, social media upvotes and shares, and other technological tooling has made the problem worse by letting people feel validated by opinions and "likeableness" of something versus things based in facts.

Real people are dying because of perpetuated information on social media and "news" outlets. Yes I understand that "individualism" should let them decide whether to make that choice, but there is a public health issue here when people are basing that choice off of Facebook memes and shared content that has no basis and gets 100k shares because it sounds cool.

100% this, excellent observation.

> FUD makes the truth hard to decipher

One thing I try to do now is "filter out the FUD". I think I'm succeeding, but I don't know how to teach others to do it, so maybe I'm not, haha. Anyway! I filter out the FUD and then look at what's left.

To, perhaps, step in it: my current case study for this is pro/anti-vax. "Both sides" definitely use and spread FUD. But, when I filter out the FUD, there's almost nothing left on the anti side, and still piles of stuff left on the pro side.

Certain groups (namely the Soviets) ran a number of conspiratorial propaganda campaigns, which were much more effective outside 'the West' (NATO-affiliated countries).

To be clear, I’ll repeat myself:

> I don’t think it’s wrong to be a skeptic