What is and isn't true
As I drove home from work I was listening to the radio and heard a pundit talking about how inappropriate it is for the Trump transition team to be working to obtain Top Secret security clearances. It bothered me to hear this because it is wholly inappropriate. It also turns out, according to a piece in USA Today such a request was never made.
Then there was this headline from a piece from the Huffington Post:
It isn't true. It's an attempt by the author of the piece to point out that people on the web don't check things out. They assume anything they see online is true and feel free to share it.
Given the level of misleading and outright falsehoods we are given online, here is a maxim of the late Ronald Reagan that you might want to adopt as your own
There is a reason that Google and Facebook are working to stop fake news sites from profiting by spreading falsehoods. Personally I do not mind certain sites. The Onion doesn't attempt to deceive anyone into thinking it is anything but satire. Then there are those who are deliberately deceptive about who they are. The .co domain is that of the nation of Colombia and there's a website out there that is abcnews_dot_com_dot_co (I'm doing that so I will not be posting a link to this fake news site) and one of the "stories" on this bullshit site is that President Obama has ordered an investigation into the election and that a "re-vote" will take place on December 19th.
Anyone who stops to think knows this to be false. But they click the "share" button and misinformation is spread as more people click and share. And more misinformation is spread.
* * *
No discussion of misinformation being spread on the web would be complete without looking at the issue of what I'll call truth of political leanings.
People get very upset when there is misinformation about those whose beliefs they share. Conversely those same people don't care about truth and accuracy when it comes to those with whom they do not share beliefs. To put it another way, it's okay to say things that range from outright lies to partial truths about those who they don't like.
I can't buy into that. Hate speech is abhorrent but the answer is not to suppress it. The same is true about making people we don't like or don't respect look worse than they are simply because of how we feel about them.
To cite an example, I saw a post that claimed Ronald Reagan "refused to even recognize" the AIDS crisis. That's not entirely true. He took too long to acknowledge it. He did not push for increased funding and research to the extent he should have, although he did increase the amount of AIDS funding in each of his budgets after 1982. And in spite of popular rumor, it was not Surgeon General C. Everett Koop who dragged Reagan into dealing with AIDS, it was the other way around, as President Reagan ordered Koop to investigate and issue a major report on the crisis.
Was it fair to label President Reagan this way? I don't think so. I think we should make our criticisms of people truthful to the nth degree. We should be as concerned that the truth be told about those we disagree with and dislike than when it comes to those we like and agree with.
To paraphrase the maxim about thinking before acting, perhaps what we should do is research before we share.
Then there was this headline from a piece from the Huffington Post:
Bernie Sanders Could Replace President Trump With Little-Known Loophole
Given the level of misleading and outright falsehoods we are given online, here is a maxim of the late Ronald Reagan that you might want to adopt as your own
There is a reason that Google and Facebook are working to stop fake news sites from profiting by spreading falsehoods. Personally I do not mind certain sites. The Onion doesn't attempt to deceive anyone into thinking it is anything but satire. Then there are those who are deliberately deceptive about who they are. The .co domain is that of the nation of Colombia and there's a website out there that is abcnews_dot_com_dot_co (I'm doing that so I will not be posting a link to this fake news site) and one of the "stories" on this bullshit site is that President Obama has ordered an investigation into the election and that a "re-vote" will take place on December 19th.
Anyone who stops to think knows this to be false. But they click the "share" button and misinformation is spread as more people click and share. And more misinformation is spread.
* * *
No discussion of misinformation being spread on the web would be complete without looking at the issue of what I'll call truth of political leanings.
People get very upset when there is misinformation about those whose beliefs they share. Conversely those same people don't care about truth and accuracy when it comes to those with whom they do not share beliefs. To put it another way, it's okay to say things that range from outright lies to partial truths about those who they don't like.
I can't buy into that. Hate speech is abhorrent but the answer is not to suppress it. The same is true about making people we don't like or don't respect look worse than they are simply because of how we feel about them.
To cite an example, I saw a post that claimed Ronald Reagan "refused to even recognize" the AIDS crisis. That's not entirely true. He took too long to acknowledge it. He did not push for increased funding and research to the extent he should have, although he did increase the amount of AIDS funding in each of his budgets after 1982. And in spite of popular rumor, it was not Surgeon General C. Everett Koop who dragged Reagan into dealing with AIDS, it was the other way around, as President Reagan ordered Koop to investigate and issue a major report on the crisis.
Was it fair to label President Reagan this way? I don't think so. I think we should make our criticisms of people truthful to the nth degree. We should be as concerned that the truth be told about those we disagree with and dislike than when it comes to those we like and agree with.
To paraphrase the maxim about thinking before acting, perhaps what we should do is research before we share.
posted by me at 3:16 AM
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