it was an extreme time, but yes, probably the most authoritarian action I've seen social media take.
misinformation is a real and worsening problem, but censorship makes conspiracies flourish, and establishes platforms as arbiters of truth. that "truth" will shift with the political tides.
IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school. maybe by creating fake articles, mixing them with real articles and having students track down sources and identify flaws. critical thinking lessons.
This just seems incredibly difficult. Even between people who are highly intelligent, educated, and consider themselves to be critical thinkers there can be a huge divergence of what "truth" is on many topics. Most people have no tools to evaluate various claims and it's not something you can just "teach kids". Not saying education can't move the needle but the forces we're fighting need a lot more than that.
I think some accountability for platforms is an important part of this. Platforms right now have the wrong incentives, we need to fix this. It's not just about "truth" but it's also about stealing our attention and time. It's a drug and we should regulate it like the drug it is.
As I recall from my school days, in Social Studies class there were a set of "Critical Thinking" questions at the end of every chapter in the textbook. Never once were we assigned any of those questions.
You do realize Arabs also massacred a lot of Jews at the same time? Both sides were absolutely abhorrent at the time, it was war between quickly assembled militias and civilians fighting for survival, that is never going to end well.
Example of Arabs lynching Jews, they started killing each other before the partition happened, so everyone knew it would be all out war after the British left:
> Arab workers stormed the refinery armed with tools and metal rods, beating 39[d] Jewish workers to death and wounding 49.
If you're going to take any conflict in the Middle East up to and including present day, and go back and forth in time to see which group "started it", you'll run out of written record first. There's always an earlier counterexample atrocity that the other side did.
Did they really bring up how the Arab massacred the Israelis during the partitioning when they talked about the 6 day war? If that was what you meant you should have said that, but you didn't so I don't believe it, to me it looks like you just wanted them to talk about Israeli atrocities there and not what the Arabs did to them before.
If you meant they should have brought up the preceding conflict when talking about the 6 day war you wouldn't just have mentioned what Israel did there.
So the only way I can read your post is that you wanted the coverage to be one sided. But maybe you were just unclear and you meant "I wanted to hear about how the conflicts escalated and arabs massacred jews which lead to jews massacring arabs and then repeat in an ever increasing spiral of violence", if so can you please clarify that is what you meant here and say you should have been clearer in your original comment?
My point is that the coverage I received in highschool civics WAS one sided in which jews were shown as heroes fighting to create a country against all odds and all the countries around it wanted to destroy them because they were jews.
The very institutions that we created to educate them against propaganda have themselves been used to instill propaganda. In this case, the very real islamaphobia and dehumanization of arabs that runs at the core of american culture.
Ok, you could have made that more clear, I didn't even consider the possibility that you didn't know the Jews did bad things when you heard that, so it sounded to me like you just wanted them to say bad things about Jews in this lecture rather than you feeling deceived.
I grew up in Sweden in the 90s and the debate was raging already then here due to significant Muslim immigration, so there was always people who brought up all these bad things the Jews did there, so I couldn't imagine an adult who cared about the topic not knowing.
>I didn't even consider the possibility that you didn't know the Jews did bad things when you heard that
so to give you context, (and I went to a good school)
In my American education, we spent 2 years covering in great detail teh horrors of the holocaust along with meeting survivors.
We spent exactly 0 days studying or learning about the kumir rouge, the vietnam war, the korean war, the congolese genocide, the Rwandan genocide or the armenian genocide.
I literally didn't learn about any of these till I went to university and was told about this stuff by peers who were more educated on these things. these topics were just not taught. An the idea that jews might the aggressors and not innocent victims? I'm pretty sure you would have gotten politically targeted for simply suggesting the idea.
so to drive the point home, most americans really have no idea.
Some of the worst examples of viral misinformation I've encountered were image posts on social media. They'll often include a graph, a bit of text and links to dense articles from medical journals. Most people will give up at that point and assume that it's legit because the citations point to BMJ et el. You actually need to type those URLs into a browser by hand, and assuming they go anywhere leverage knowledge taught while studying university level stats.
I spent several hours on one of these only to discover the author of the post had found a subtle way to misrepresent the findings and had done things to the graph to skew it further. You cannot expect a kid (let alone most adults) to come to the same conclusion through lessons on critical thinking.
> "IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school. maybe by creating fake articles, mixing them with real articles and having students track down sources and identify flaws. critical thinking lessons."
You just described a perfectly normal "Civics & Current Events" class in early grade-school back when / where I grew up. We were also taught how to "follow the facts back to the actual sources" and other such proper research skills. This was way back when you had to go to an actual library and look up archived newspapers on microfiche, and encyclopedias were large collections of paper books. Y'know... When dinosaurs still roamed the streets... ;)
> IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school.
This is extremely difficult. Many of the people who thrive on disinformation are drawn to it because they are contrarian. They distrust anything from the establishment and automatically trust anything that appears anti-establishment. If you tell them not to trust certain sources that’s actually a cue to them to explore those sources more and assume they’re holding some valuable information that “they” don’t want you to know.
The dynamics of this are very strange. A cluster of younger guys I know can list a dozen different times medical guidance was wrong in history from memory (Thalidomide, etc), but when you fact check Joe Rogan they laugh at you because he’s a comedian so you can’t expect him to be right about everything. “Do your own research” is the key phrase, which is a dog whistle to mean find some info to discount the professionals but then take sources like Joe Rogan and his guests at face value because they’re not the establishment.
misinformation is a real and worsening problem, but censorship makes conspiracies flourish, and establishes platforms as arbiters of truth. that "truth" will shift with the political tides.
IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school. maybe by creating fake articles, mixing them with real articles and having students track down sources and identify flaws. critical thinking lessons.