I hate how hard our fragmented, gamified social media is making the dissemination of key civic data.
Take this video of NC Senator Natasha Marcus outlining how many so-called pregnancy centers are just fronts to siphon public money into private hands (& of course, under the veneer of US political Christianity).
Posted on TikTok. Reposted on reddit.
What we need is responsible media to make civic knowledge easier to attain. But how do we build better public platforms?
@MLClark The problem is that trying to counter all the disinformation is like playing Whac-A-Mole.
We as consumers of information have to do a better job of reviewing what is fed to us. You and I, as trained researchers, know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, but most people are more interested in practicing confirmation bias.
You and I, Stephen, are tearing our hair out! 🙃
But seriously - gamified platforms play a role in individual outcomes. I can't discuss most of what happened in the first year of a new venture where I publish even now, but... suffice it to say, I saw a lot of how the "sausage" is made by squeezing all attempts to change the model through a grinder that reduces everything to the need to produce high-SEO-value content to keep the lights on in an era of less investment to go around.
IOW: We get the quality of civic education we're willing to invest in.
There *should* be more places like ProPublica and Open Archives. Or search engines like WolframAlpha, before it too sold out to private interests.
But everything good requires stable bipartisan public funding to offset market pressures. And that is *really* hard to come by in our current tech culture and financial systems.
@MLClark "We get the quality of civic education we're willing to invest in."
As an aside ... The co-founder of Moms for Liberty lives here locally. Our school district has become a cesspool, er, petri dish for what they're trying out around the country.
Their act plays well in Trumpy districts, but not much beyond that, in my opinion.
Oof. 😬 The wrong kind of "culture" indeed.