this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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OPINION: Are We Having a Moral Panic Over Misinformation? (undark.org)
submitted 1 year ago by HowRu68@lemmy.world to c/europe@feddit.de
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"I don’t like this whole talk of ‘we’re living in a post-truth world,’ as if we ever lived in a truth world"

Ever since the first humans developed language, we’ve been navigating an information landscape pitted with lies, tall tales, myths, pseudoscience, half-truths, and plain old inaccuracies.

*Personally, I don't agree with some statements, but I must acknowledge that panic and being judgemental also won't help us out. In this day and age proper contact appears to have become more difficult, and that's without the pitfalls of mis- and or disinformation. *

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[–] trollercoaster@feddit.de 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that it’s all bullshit

And here we have the biggest problem. Many people won't fully read a long text, also, the discrepancies in the generated bullshit might be more subtle and/or require a fair bit of understanding of the topic at hand to spot.

Bullshit generators (I refuse to call text generators, regardless of their working principle, by any other name) don't only annoy and waste time, they have the potential to misinform people on virtually anything, and if those people are making decisions based on a bunch of generated bullshit, it has the potential to cause real world damage.

[–] taladar@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bullshit generators

The problem with this term is that we have a lot of human professions that could be described with it too, mainly in the spheres of populist politics, marketing, sales and similar fields.

[–] trollercoaster@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

I don't see a problem with including those, too. Maybe for a more nuanced view, we could introduce a distinction between biological and technological bullshit generators.