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Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

Clinicallydepressedpoochie @lemmy.world

6d ago

If we silenced all the sources of misinformation/disinformation people would be aghast at how quiet it is.

25 comments

When Russia invaded the Ukraine, and sanctions were initially placed against them and the internet to Russia was cut... Reddit was its old self for about 2 weeks. There were still some random nut bags wondering around saying crazy and hateful shit, but the level of misinformation and everything else dropped by at least 90%. It was pretty eye-opening.
- What weeks? I wanna look on the IA.
  
  If they mean the beginning of invasion, that would be end of February 2022
  
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/08/lumen-internet-russia-backbone-cut/
- I remember that. Can't recall the name, but there was one subreddit that was reduced to literally one person/bot posting when the Russian ones went dark.
  
  Do you mean when they banned bots and like 95% of the content on most of the top reddits stopped coming in?
  Or did this happen twice?
- wandering*
  "wondering around" isn't a phrase, just so you know.
  
  Ya, your write. Eye dew that alot. Sorry.

I would be delighted. I feel the same way about advertising - just show me the product and describe its features, don't do a song and dance or put on a little play about it.
- Lay's Potato Chips: thin slices of potatoes fried and covered in salt.
  
  reaches for bowl
- How can you sell it to people who "didn't know they needed it" then? ("Bad" example -> luxury items, "good" example -> new tech which is actually helpful but hard to explain)

It depends on how you classify misinformation/ disinformation... Scientific disinformation could just be stuff that has been disproven...
- You know damn well what misinformation he’s talking about! Stop feeding us misinformation!
- Or things yet to be disproven
  
  Science has an unintuitive philosophical system, it is actually impossible (or just not feasible) to "disprove" a lot of things absolutely 100%.
  Best you can do is prove something, or fail to prove something.
  And it does make some sense, there's uncertainty in measurements, there's some probability and statistics involved.
  Proving there are NOT aliens out there would require checking every inch of every planet for life, remains, or fossils.
- We talking flat earth? Vax deniers? Are you disagreeing?
  
  All of the above.

Only if humor isn't accounted for and jokes also get purged for not being factual. Biggest reason I am against automated moderation. A bot or AI doesn't know if something is a joke or not, and needs a human (one with a sense of humor) to be able to tell the difference.

I guarantee the results would be the opposite of what you expect. The disinformation maintains the consensus. The voices speaking against the norm are the ones being drowned out by the bots and astroturfers.

25 comments