If TwitFaceGoog (TFG) worked for Democracy...
they'd undertake a massive campaign to educate users on how to tell the difference between claims and facts. They'd grace the People with the reasoning abilities to know when something is proven, disproven, or needs more information before deciding its value.
Teach people how rhetorical tricks and manipulative tactics are used on them. Teach people how trolls operate. How to check the sourcing, and whether there is more than one source.
But TwitFaceGoog (TFG) is run by people in the 1%. Heaven knows they could easily add Training in Adult Thinking as a term of use. And provide such training for free. They could afford to buy a few months of TV/radio/print spots: "How the ad hominem is used" for instance. "How to check a claim." "Look, a Red Herring!"
But if anything like that was done by them, they'd lose their membership in the club. At the least.
So they opt for censorship and the suppression of things that challenge their Fellows's interests. Which are almost never the People's interests. And that trend is only going to grow. "First, they came for the tin-foil hatted..."
A good discussion amongst ourselves would begin with ideas on how we can get people educated to reason ably. (And learning the value of interacting like adults would help, too.)
On a related subject: Election Integrity.
Has anyone noticed that for all the concern about foreign powers being able to hack our electronic voting system, there's not been one public figure, one time, calling for Paper Ballots? Even though the hackability and back-doors to voting machines and scanners has been an established fact for a good decade now?
(And it ain't just "foreign powers" who have an interest in messing with vote counting.)
Paper ballots, counted by hand in front of hundreds of live witnesses. Broadcast live on youtube. The ballots collected for counting by an assembly of the candidates' and parties' agents, all traveling together. What could be more secure? But not one public figure, even those with their hair on fire about "foreign meddling"...?
Ain't it amazing how dishonest and false our public figures have become?
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Topics TFG could cover, and so could electronic/print media, any time they cared to promote Democracy. "Logical Fallacy Taxonomy" is the name of the picture (how to embed?)
https://triangulations.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/fallacy.png
Comments
Ain't it amazing...
They aren't dishonest any more than 100 years ago, or even before. It's just that the assholes are more brazen about it. We mean less than ant turds in a wheel rut to them. But now we have the means to see it--namely the Intertubez.
A class on mass manipulation and the power of propaganda
Should be required, at least at the high school level.
Beware the bullshit factories.
Send that misbegotten bastard "social studies", which is little
more than indoctrination in politically correct attitudes, to the landfill and revive the study or history, civics and geography.
History in particular teaches intellectual skills, such how to distinguish fact from opinion from supposition.
Fact: for most purposes, what we know to be true.
Opinion: things people believe because that is what they want to believe.
Supposition: educated guess, reasonable assumption. conclusion to which the preponderance of evidence leads you.
Mary Bennett
Judge said no to paper ballot in Georgia
I want paper ballots too, counted on live feeds. Can't find a reason to bother to vote until it happens, actually.
Judge says, "No" to GA Paper Ballot. But made sure to say 'Electronic voting machines hackable'.
-_-
We learned, a long time ago, from a grandma, that it's not the machine; it's the results/counting software. "Hacking Democracy". Where's the film about 2016 Dem Primary theft? [Rhetorical]