The amount of disinformation shared in online forums is utterly disheartening. I follow it daily in war forums, where people just shoot off dishonestly to whip up righteous fury, and have zero interest in checking their assumptions. (Many are also just plants.)
Now, with the Moscow incident, I've also been watching similarly self-serving conspiracies run ahead of and against actual data. Sheer gamification of atrocity.
Guys, I really wonder about this whole "internet commons" thing sometimes.
@MLClark Social media disinformation and misinformation has made so-called mainstream media more important than ever. (And the general decline of reporting and newsrooms in the last three decades more of a tragedy.)
Absolutely. And not just "reporting and newsrooms" in general: plenty of research correlates the decline in local news outlets with huge upticks in political schism, and reduced civic activity.
Without a reliable *ground-up* media economy, we're fighting an uphill battle not only against disinformation but also disengagement from many meaningful sites of democratic action.