Talk:Everyone's favorite news site

Knowing how you know

As fake news becomes increasingly entangled with real news, each of us has a responsibility to know how we know. This is difficult, but could become easier if social media sites required traceability to the original author for every post. The idea is: 1) Each social media site requires verification that each user is an identifiable real person. 2) The author of each post is identified when the post originates. 3) A log entry is created as each original post is re-posted. This allows every post to be traced back to the original author, who has been verified to be a real person. 4) When a post originates from an organization, rather than an individual, the organization is identified as journalism or not. If an organization claims to be journalism, then their journalism policy must be published transparently. This could help us identify reliable sources from unreliable sources. When the framers of the Bill of Rights protected freedom of speech, the author of each speech was easily determined. This proposal could help restore that accountability in our age of social media. Thanks! --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 15:16, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Have you seen Siva Vaidhyanathan (12 June 2018). Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (in en). Oxford University Press. Wikidata Q56027099. ISBN 978-0-19-084118-8. ? This book claims that Facebook has so much data on so many people, that it becomes profitable to target ads to groups as small as 20. Each such ad could seem complete ridiculous to 99 percent of humanity but resonate with the preconceptions of those 20. In so doing, it could push them to become even more extreme. This combined with the research of Daniel Kahneman and summarized in his (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow explains how Facebook, and to a lesser extent other media, make money by amplifying the Balkanization and exploitation of the international body politic.

I think this calls for a couple of things:

1. Require all media companies to maintain a database of all ads open to the public with the text and the sources of the ads fully searchable and otherwise fully available for data mining by others -- and requiring all advertisers to identify the real sources of the money, not creating millions of shell companies for different ads.
2. A social movement to encourage people to migrate away from for-profit social media to free open-source social media, based on software like Mastodon (software), Diaspora (software), GNU social, and others on the Wikipedia w:Comparison of software and protocols for distributed social networking and w:Comparison of microblogging services. I have not personally tried any of these, but I think it could be quite feasible to convince a critical mass of the international body politic to move away from for-profit social media to non-profit social media, as described in this article.

Thanks for your comments. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 16:33, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Mark Twain and others observed that "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on." Therefore it seems more important to reduce the allure of falsehoods than to increase access to accurate (and representative) information. Therefore I continue to focus on undercutting disinformation by inoculating the consumer against nonsense. My courses on Knowing How you Know, Intellectual Honesty, Practicing Dialogue, Socratic Methods and the Clear Thinking curriculum all seek to do that. Enrollment is underwhelming. Thanks! --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 12:39, 3 January 2019 (UTC)