Hacker News Reader

Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

I have a better idea.

Fix the broken trust between people. Put proper checks and balances into business and government. Enforce these laws and don't let the powerful cheat their way out. If you let polluters get away and shoddy business practices prevail no one will trust that these same businesses have the well being of humans in mind when creating and selling something like an Aircraft. Same can be said for medicine or anything else.

How much trust can a person have in an government oversight agency when it's employees leave for jobs at the very companies they are supposed to oversee?

Look at the FAA, FDA, FCC etc. The trust has huge holes and they need to be fixed.

This illusion that a free market will sort itself out as in bad businesses automatically go out of business doesn't work because in order to find out who they are a lot of people need to die first. Sometimes decades later.

View on HN

> Fix the broken trust between people.

What you describe is mostly fixing the trust in institutions. And I agree that doing so is important, though I don't see it addressing disinformation all that much (except, I suppose, official disinformation.)

But the problem with disinformation isn't so much the trustworthiness of institutions. It's, first, information originates somewhere. Sometimes it's from an institution. Sometimes it's from a foreign institution that's deliberately sowing disinformation. And sometimes it's from an individual who's either misinformed or deliberately sowing disinformation.

Then, second, disinformation gets spread. These days, much of this part is by individuals, though some of it is by fake individuals who are part of foreign disinformation campaigns. And this is where your quote comes in. Fix the broken trust between people? To do that, I need people who are trustworthy to not push disinformation onto my feed. To fix the trust, you need to fix the people so that they become trustworthy.

And even that breaks down when you have foreign disinformation campaigns, who create fake people and do everything they can to make them appear trustworthy, so that they will be believed when they spread disinformation.

I don't have a good solution. But any solution has to involve changing people.

You can't get rid of disinformation especially if it's a gray area where "both" versions are somewhat correct. Sometimes the disinformation is just an incomplete picture or something out of context.

The issue I see is the the "authorities" or institutions that you could go to to get an answer to your uncertainty are not trusted. It is also very important for "authorities" on issues to not laugh off stupid questions, instead they should answer questions clearly and not in a condensation tone which sadly I see a lot today. Yes the question may be way out of bound but by answering it clearly and concise you give it weight, laughing at people does the opposite and fuels the conspiracy.

I would love to see a poll done in the US asking people if they trust so and so. From institutions to members of congress to their neighbor. I think the result would be quite shocking

> You can't get rid of disinformation especially if it's a gray area where "both" versions are somewhat correct. Sometimes the disinformation is just an incomplete picture or something out of context.

Absolutely. Disinformation often uses true facts to paint a false narrative. (By cherry-picking the facts that are considered, and only pointing out the ones that fit the narrative. And if you point out the other facts, the ones that don't support the narrative, then you get accused of denying the data that does support the narrative, even if what you're actually doing is pointing out that all the data, when considered together, does not support the narrative.)

Such polls are done frequently and have been for a long time, so there's a wealth of data on who and what the US population trusts, like this one:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/trust-and-di...

I have thought to myself a lot recently that creating a reliable form of digital trust is probably one of the most important endeavors of this decade or future decades. Otherwise, as more things go digital, there will inevitably be more orchestration of the digital world for evil purposes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com