Author: Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (University of Chicago Press). Researcher, infolit/misinfo/rhetoric/civic reasoning. Currently researching AI as tool for critical thinking.
This is a great take
rm [-r] liningerSomeone asked if they should be worried about OpenAI’s agent hacking HuggingFace without explicit instruction to do so, but they didn’t as me. My answer is yes. Not because of what the AI agent did — it was given broad instruction and did what it was told! — but because OpenAI wasn’t monitoring.
This is what I mean when I say conspiracy theory is not a way of thinking but a form of discourse; its core is Wilhoit's Law but for evidence: There must be in-groups whom norms of argument protect but do not bind, alongside out-groups whom the norms bind but do not protect.
Philip BumpThe core of the right-wing information universe is that one correction from a mainstream outlet proves it can’t be trusted and that one accurate claim in a flurry of false ones proves that they must be.
Lindsay is correct here and on a related point it's been sad to see this site swarm around whatever the latest conspiracy theory is. I'm increasingly convinced that any organizing upsides of social media for the left are cancelled out by fact it makes the left fracture over phantom issues.
Lindsay BeyersteinThe longer this goes on the more I suspect that Mitch McConnell is worth more to the Dems alive and hidden. They have no incentive to confirm the likely truth: He's too sick to vote, but he won't retire.
People still talk about false stuff online like it's only information. But information is experience. People believe they saw something or that something is happening and to them it's no less real than watching the twin towers collapse or the Iran hostage crisis. Of *course* that changes people.
There's an inside baseball misinformation studies point I want to make here about enduring five years of the political science and sociology folks saying: "people online don't really believe this stuff, this is all just downstream expression" and what an obvious crock that was.
Jonathan V. LastWorst part of the new @status.news report is that the Bari Weiss team appears to get its view of what is actually happening in the world from Twitter. They were asking Vega to include things that *weren't real* b/c they didn't know any better. www.status.news/p/cecilia-ve...