The attached article delves deep into this topic of the impact of social media and how we as a society decide on "truth":
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publica ... -knowledge
The writer makes a lot of very good points - although there are several places where I think he gets defensive an a little myopic.
asked about Vice President Dick Cheney's insinuations that Kerry's election would lead to a devastating attack on the United States. "Well," replied Trump, "it's a terrible statement unless he gets away with it." With that extraordinary declaration, Trump showed himself to be an attentive student of disinformation and its operative principle: Reality is what you can get away with.
This is the problem of social epistemology, which concerns itself with how societies come to some kind of public understanding about truth. It is a fundamental problem for every culture and country, and the attempts to resolve it go back at least to Plato,
The answer is that we need an elite consensus, and hopefully also something approaching a public consensus, on the method of validating propositions. We needn't and can't all agree that the same things are true, but a critical mass needs to agree on what it is we do that distinguishes truth from falsehood, and more important, on who does it.
Who can be trusted to resolve questions about objective truth? The best answer turns out to be no one in particular. The greatest of human social networks was born centuries ago, in the wake of the chaos and creedal wars that raged across Europe after the invention of the printing press (the original disruptive information technology).
One rule is that any hypothesis can be floated. That's free speech. But another rule is that a hypothesis can join reality only insofar as it persuades people after withstanding vigorous questioning and criticism. That's social testing. Only those propositions that are broadly agreed to have withstood testing over time qualify as knowledge, and even they stand only unless and until debunked.
The community that follows these rules is defined by its values and practices, not by its borders, and it is by no means limited to scholars and scientists. It also includes journalism, the courts, law enforcement, and the intelligence community
(although in that last passage, I think he puts forward a rather high-minded version of today's established media...)
To protect the wide end of the funnel, we disallow censorship. We say: Alt-truth is never criminalized. At the same time, to protect the narrow end of the funnel, we regulate influence. We say: Alt-truth is always ignored. You can believe and say whatever you want. But if your beliefs don't check out, or if you don't submit them for checking, you can't expect anyone else to publish, care about, or even notice what you think. Striking this balance is difficult, and maintaining it involves a lot of implicit social cooperation. The constitution of knowledge requires high degrees of both toleration and discipline, neither of which is easy to come by.
the implications of troll epistemology come into sharper focus. By insisting that all the fact checkers and hypothesis testers out there are phonies, trolls discredit the very possibility of a socially validated reality, and open the door to tribal knowledge, personal knowledge, partisan knowledge, and other manifestations of epistemic anarchy. By spreading lies and disinformation on an industrial scale, they sow confusion about what might or might not be true, and about who can be relied on to discern the difference, and about whether there is any difference. By being willing to say anything, they exploit shock and outrage to seize attention and hijack the public conversation.
First, social media created a distribution platform for disinformation. Putting stuff out there costs effectively nothing. Mobilizing troll armies of humans and bots is easy and cheap.
Second, software learned to hack our brains. Sophisticated algorithms and granular data allowed messages and images to be minutely tuned and targeted.
Third, the clickbait economy created a business model. Disinformation went from vandalistic to profitable
Charges that academia, journalism, and other evidence-based enterprises are bogus, biased, illegitimate, racist, oppressive, secular-humanist, and so on are nothing new, and they contain important grains of truth. Although the marvel of our knowledge-making institutions is how well they have functioned (especially compared to the alternatives), it's reasonable to worry about, for example, liberal bias in traditional media and a replication crisis in establishment science. The answer, however, is to remediate the defects, not to trash the institutions.
And so if universities are rackets, merely imposing some opinions on everyone else or pursuing someone's political agenda, then the constitution of knowledge is a racket, too. If universities foster cultures of conformity rather than of criticism, if they traffic in politicized orthodoxies and secular religions, then the winner is not social justice but trolling. Which is all downside.
