8 Comments

YIKES.

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Ann, you're a courageous soul, and marvelous muckraker, at a time when no one else is doing it.

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Thank you, dear reader!

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You know, there really isn't any good reason to be on Facebook or Twitter at all....

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Barely, certainly! The thing that troubles me more than whether I or not I am on there myself is that I am torn over what to do next. I see the point in a way about interfering with what people post, but I can’t see a way to return to an environment in which people get vetted information. As soon as you are paying for it, it becomes a kind of luxury item…. Are we doomed to be surrounded by untruth? I’m really scared of how it will all be turbocharged by AI.

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AI does scramble the equation. I admit that I'm actually a little skeptical about the vetting, being more or less a "marketplace of ideas" kind of guy. But I think that is challenged not just by AI, but by sheer information overload, combined with a general erosion of trust. The marketplace of ideas worked pretty well when each city had a Republican paper and a Democratic paper and there were a handful of networks, maybe a bit of talk radio. But it's not reasonable to expect that any ordinary voter will sift through the mass of information out there. The normal solution for that sort of thing is to have a trusted voice who is doing that full time that you go to for a thoughtful perspective. But now there are no longer any trusted voices (or else people trust voices that are nuts!).

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Well researched post. I cancelled my Facebook account last week. I posted my reasoning on my web site.

https://vinemaple.net/

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Thank you! I’ll check it out!

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