SYLVIA MCKEOWN: Cracking down on misinformation
With the rise of disturbing videos and predatory content, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are developing various forms of censorship
The internet over the past few years has almost been a game of broken telephone on the grandest of scales. Each story that appears upon it becomes all the more fractured as it passes another layer of bias. Finding homes in silos of social media circles is compounded and amplified by our ability to filter out what no longer fits our worldview. As a card-carrying liberal, my social media feed is usually sprinkled with news from moderate to left-leaning sites, with some moments of occasional sobering right rhetoric. For it is slowly becoming clear: as much as I like learning of developments in marriage equality, women in science doing wonderous things and seeing a healthy dose of baby animals being ridiculously cute, I also need to see the world of climate change deniers, antivaxxers and incels – involuntary celibates – attacking women for having an opinion. We need to do the work and confront our bias to keep our bubbles in check, an act that has become increasingly hard to do as opin...
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