Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News
Council on Foreign Relations Conference
May 3, 2018
Even more than a media trustworthiness problem, we have a media illiteracy problem. People don't know anything about verifying sources, evaluating information, etc. It's more than just a public illiteracy, it's become even a news-room illiteracy...a lot of misinformation or disinformation is designed to make you not want to evaluate its credibility because it tells you what you want to hear or makes you feel special or chosen to receive the inside information...there's an entire branch of the marketing industry called "neuro-marketing" that figure out how to trigger the amygdala related to fears, which part of the brain relates to perception of your body, disgust, hate...they use MRI's, EEG's...everything's "free" on the internet because it's paid for by the marketing data collected on users...one speaker downloaded his data that Google had collected and there were 600,000 pages!
...In the past we've had our cultural spaces to discuss ideas affecting our community--like the office water cooler, library, the bowling alley--where there was mutual trust and respect and we need to foster more of that. [brings to mind this great forum presciently formed over a decade ago to serve this purpose.]
