Why Your Newsfeed SUCKS - Smarter Every Day 212

[ryoder 1,590]

An unusual topic for Destin, but a very good primer on fact-checking.

My one complaint is that he should have pointed out that social media is fundamentally an echo-chamber, not a news source.

 

[BIGUN 1,462]

On 3/18/2019 at 9:33 AM, ryoder said:

An unusual topic for Destin, but a very good primer on fact-checking.

Good post. Thank you. @mediawise  #IsThisLegit 

[billvon 3,095]

On 3/18/2019 at 7:33 AM, ryoder said:

An unusual topic for Destin, but a very good primer on fact-checking.

Good overview.  The "who is the source?" is one of the most important questions to ask (IMO) even though doing so gets immediate criticism for "attacking the source!"  Well, of course - if the topic is climate change, you can immediately throw out anything by Willie Soon or Greenpeace, because they have a history of making stuff up.  If it came from NOAA or Nature, it's probably more reliable.

Another issue I see is that many news feeds nowadays are too smart for your own good.  They look at what you click on and give you more of that.  So if all you ever click on are stories that say "climate change is fake!" you will eventually end up with a feed where a lot of stories say climate change is fake.  And that can make you think that, hey, pretty much all scientists DO agree that it's fake, like I've been saying all along!

I generally try to avoid such newsfeeds.  And when I do read them (i.e. I am waiting in an airplane with nothing to do) I try to just remember the interesting stories on line, then look them up later by doing a Google search.  At that point Google doesn't have that newsreader's history and will tend to give you a wider spread of stories on that topic.

[Coreece 190]

6 hours ago, BIGUN said:

On 3/18/2019 at 2:33 PM, ryoder said:

An unusual topic for Destin, but a very good primer on fact-checking.

Good post.

Well that has yet to be determined,  so I'm hooking up a third monitor for superior lateral reading capabilities.