The EU is to change the law to make social media owners and company executives personally liable with fines, or potential jail sentences, for failing to deal with misinformation that promotes violence. That’s good, but teaching critical thinking is even more important.
AI is about to make the threat of misinformation orders of magnitude greater. It is now possible to fake images, video, and audio indistinguishable from reality. We need new ways to combat this, and relying on top-down approaches isn’t enough. There’s another likely consequence - expect lots of social media misinformation telling you how bad critical thinking is. The people who use misinformation don’t want smart, informed people who can spot them lying.
How long until some dumbfuck waste of carbon conservative declares this to be woke?
Or has it happened already?
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English originally meaning alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination.
Yes it’s woke. Yes that’s good. I’ll never shy away from calling out the right’s ridiculous demonisation of anti-racism…
Edit: Also yea, I bet Nigel Farage or some other Reform fool is already yelling into the void about this.
Better late than never I guess.
Kiwi here, WTH is critical thinking, anyway?
We don’t get taught shit, now they just present some content or ideas and hope we magically absorb it
Critical thinking is being able to question things and figure out if it’s bullshit basically.
Like the accented farter said, critical thinking is a set of skills and the practice necessary to learn them that allows one to examine any given idea and judge the credibility, usefulness, and accuracy present (or lack thereof).
It also involves a minor degree of language and reading comprehension as an underlying prerequisite. You don’t have to be more than basically literate, and close to fluency with a given language to make use of the skills. That’s important because some people think that critical thinking can’t be effectively taught before a given age (usually stated as early as tweens and as late as high school). But as long as the person can process language well enough to understand basic questions, you can lay the groundwork for it as early as kids start school anyway.
Chur! Thanks for the great response!
Oh, now we need critical thinking skills.
This is a positive thing. I hope more governments do this, especially in South America, it could reduce the severity of anti-government protests fueled by outside campaigns.
I’m highly skeptical of teaching critical thinking, personally. Isn’t that an oxymoron?
It would be hypocritical if you forced them to accept what you were teaching without questioning it. No good education institution behaves that way.
Yeah, exactly.
The thing I always think about when someone says misinformation is who decides. The ministry of truth?
