False and misleading posts about the Ukraine conflict continue to go viral on major social media platforms, as Russia’s invasion of the country extends beyond 500 days.
Some of the most widely shared examples can be found on Twitter, posted by subscribers with a blue tick, who pay for their content to be promoted to other users.
At some point we have to start blaming the people reading this stuff. I’m not saying that social media platforms shouldn’t try to address this problem, but clearly they don’t know how to, and don’t care. That’s why we’re here, after all.
Ribbit
Also true.
It’s misinformation directed at a certain target group. I bet you that there’s misinformation out there directed at people like you and me that we’ve fallen for.
Oh surely. But I personally I would consider that a failure on my part. I’m not saying it’s all on users, but I do wish people thought more about what they read.
I agree, but governments are poor at educating adults. (Well, they’re poor at educating children, too.) There’s no way the situation will improve by blaming the problem on the users.
In the past I would have agreed with you, but in the age of increasingly sophisticated AI being able to nearly perfectly imitate people’s voices or images, I think we need to start asking more of social media companies. When truth starts looking indistinguishable from fiction we’re going to need to find new ways of parsing which is which. Fact checking will be extremely important.
Yeah, that’s true.