Some guy on a podcast about January 6th disinformation said we have to educate kids about fake stuff online so they can navigate it. Good luck with that. I’m not against media literacy education, but that’s not going to solve everything because it’s just too time consuming to research everything yourself. The bullshit asymmetry principle and that sort of thing. He might as well just tell people “do your own research” like a Qanon already. He claimed we have to do that because private companies are within their rights to allow all manner of crap on their platforms. It’s like making people get years of education just to do their own medical testing to make sure medications they’ll need to take someday are safe and effective. Or making people test all the food to make sure it’s safe. I thought the whole point of a civilization was division of labor. What is going on with these people who want us all to have to do the job of sorting through every bit of misinformation? And this while hugely rich billionaires just rake in the money and refuse to provide that reasonable service for all that money they get. Why would we have to put up with that?
We need some kind of structure to be able to manage information pollution.