Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

> According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations.

A real “be careful what you wish for” tale. When I think back to the advent of the World Wide Web, breaking the mainstream media’s hold on information distribution seemed like such a wonderful possibility.

Fast forward a few decades and here we are: corporate controlled social media networks are indiscriminately pushing absolutely anything that keeps eyeballs engaged in front of their users who treat it all as fact.

I can’t quite say I’m nostalgic for the days of mainstream media domination but it feels increasingly like we jumped from the frying pan into the fire. At least it was accountable: you might not like an article the Washington Post or the New York Times published but you’d know who wrote it and you’d know who published it. If you didn’t want to read it you could just not read the paper any more. Now we have faceless anonymous social media accounts pushing any old crap and the networks themselves holding up their hands and saying “who, me? Oh, that’s nothing to do with me!”.

You might not like an article in the Economist, and you will not know who wrote it.

You might not like a tweet and you can block the user or stop using twitter entirely. Yes, that might be hard, twitter might feel important, you might feel excluded if you don't keep up with it, but that's also true for mass media.

If you don't like anonymous speech, you will have to avoid certain mass media, like the Economist, and you have to choose certain social networks, like Facebook. You have choice with both social media and mass media.

> You might not like an article in the Economist, and you will not know who wrote it.

The Economist not publishing author names is a minor detail in the grand scheme of things. The point is that The Economist is in full control of what it publishes and is accountable for it. If I don't like the Economist I won't read it.

> You might not like a tweet and you can block the user or stop using twitter entirely.

IMO Twitter is a bad example here. It's very easy to give up on Twitter. But people use Facebook for a huge range of things, not just for getting news. And blocking individual accounts is a constant exercise in whack-a-mole, one I engage in frequently. New accounts always pop up.

Personally, I've found that it's best to simply not use Facebook at all as a social media site, and to only use it as a chat app. So basically, I can keep a list of friends there, and I can chat with them through Messenger (the video chat, in particular, works quite well IME and is great for keeping in touch with family across continents), but I steadfastly ignore the "social media" stuff: I don't post anything on the "wall", I don't look at other people's postings, I certainly don't follow any political groups, etc. So I don't have to worry about things like blocking anyone's account, because the only accounts I'm exposed to are the ones in my friends list.

With the proliferation of AI content creation tools as the catalyst, we're going to go from a natural decentralization cycle to a natural centralization cycle which will be bringing trust back to sources like WSJ and NBC nightly news. Obviously you still have to keep your guard up but that was never and will never be not true.

Further, many of the social media sources today will work to show "real" sources versus AI generated content, etc. and that will result in some of those sources themselves just becoming centralized authorities on what is generated and what is not, though that job is more difficult.

I guess you mean to say that we will go back to centralization since nothing decentralized can be trusted, with how easy it will become to fake facts. But that's assuming that the consumer primarily cares about truth. If that was the case, we would not be here to begin with.

I think you're right to point out whether or not citizens [1] care about the truth is important, and some do/don't but I don't think that has a large effect on the centralization and decentralization cycle here because part of the cycle is simply the proliferation of new media sources of which many will inevitably die and also because I do think people will want more authoritative sources of information instead of everything being "democratized".

[1] I'm explicitly using citizens here instead of "consumer" because I detest that characterization of people and refuse to use the term. We need to have higher standards.

Why would people trust them now? Now nobody is to be trusted. By the time the 'news' get it it's old and already on Twitter. Nobody besides boomers watch the news and 23 year olds aren't going to log off TikTok to watch boring shit they already knew 8hr ago with more detail than the 30 seconds they will hear about it from some loser talking head in a suit.

Weirdly, I don't find it as bad as it was a few years ago. There was a time when my FB and other social media feeds were full of clear disinformation. Now, I mostly just see political discussions with the usual slants. But that never really changed.

The exception might be TikTok and the reposts of TikTok on Instagram, but I have nearly zero engagement there.

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