who do you trust?

[cyrano]

What's happening to Trudeau is appalling.  He'd better completely ignore it. WTF is wrong with some people. Are we gonna crucify Karl May for making kids play cowboy and indian?

Anyhow, if you want papers, here's one from Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02562-z

Information gerrymandering in social networks skews collective decision-making

 

[boji]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/technology/facebook-data-privacy-suspension.html

 

[Tubetec]

Two excelent articles there, cheers guys,
Ive always viewed mainstream social media with the height of suspicion , I did of course have to withstand all the jibes over the years,tin foil helmet, paranoid etc etc 
In recent times Im getting more and more people coming up to me to say you were right all along but of course the data genie is well out of the bottle at this stage, we have been very badly let down by our public representatives who in the headlong rush to appear in lights on facebook themselves , bought and sold the whole  lot of us behind our backs, there will be hell to pay yet .

 

[cyrano]

It's not the tool, it's what you do with it...

There's no doubt in my mind Zuckerberg has no respect for anything. Let alone our privacy. He's a smart brat with a bad attitude and a hunger for power. He's currently learning money can't buy everyone.

From what I've heard, even inside FB some people are very much amazed by all the things Zuckerberg has done.

 

[desol]

It's not the tool, it's what you do with it...

There's no doubt in my mind Zuckerberg has no respect for anything. Let alone our privacy. He's a smart brat with a bad attitude and a hunger for power. He's currently learning money can't buy everyone.

From what I've heard, even inside FB some people are very much amazed by all the things Zuckerberg has done.

Facebook. The illusion of a necessary evil.

 

[AnalogPackrat]

I have no information to back this up except for observation of others in my circle but, it would seem that the more "low information" folks don't even bother with a search engine all that often for info. 
Being in an echo chamber on FB or Twitter seems the primary source for a lot of folks.

That's funny.  In my hyper-educated work arena (over 50% PhDs in STEM) I see the same bubble phenomenon, but driven by BS mass media which is what everyone watches and where all the Google searches lead.  Imagine that.  It isn't about "information" or "intelligence," but an ever lower level of skepticism.  So many people just refuse to question anything at all anymore.  How many times have you seen some talking head on the news yapping about something for which YOU have intimate knowledge and seen them totally botch it?  Well, guess what?  They botch it a LOT of the time.  Yet so many just take what the media says or writes as fact.

 

[JohnRoberts]

That's funny.  In my hyper-educated work arena (over 50% PhDs in STEM) I see the same bubble phenomenon, but driven by BS mass media which is what everyone watches and where all the Google searches lead.  Imagine that.  It isn't about "information" or "intelligence," but an ever lower level of skepticism.  So many people just refuse to question anything at all anymore.  How many times have you seen some talking head on the news yapping about something for which YOU have intimate knowledge and seen them totally botch it?  Well, guess what?  They botch it a LOT of the time.  Yet so many just take what the media says or writes as fact.

I was lucky to learn that early... back in the 60's I attended anti-war rallies in Boston (Viet Nam for you young pukes) and then saw the TV news and read newspaper stories that were not even close to what I experienced first hand.

I appreciate the classic fable of ten blind men trying to describe an elephant by touch... when you are on the boston common with thousands of protesters how are a few reporters with one camera going to capture the "whole" story.  It gets even worse as TV news matured to be all about the catchy visuals. Then the politicians learned to help provide the news with convenient photo ops.

Sadly it is human nature to not question everything critically... we only have so many brain cells to spread around, but we should question a lot more than we do.

JR