Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

After the 2016 election, there was a thought that too much false information is spreading on social media. This happens in every country and across every form of communication - but social media platforms seem particularly worrysome (and is particularly bad with Whatsapp forwards in some Asian countries).

So what should the social media companies do? Censor people? Disallow certain messages (like they do with terrorism related posts)?

They settled on just putting in fact check links with certain posts. Trust in the fact deciding institution will of course be difficult to settle. No one wants a ministry of truth (or the private alternative).

So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?

I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. It is documented that textbook manufacturers publish different history and science texts based on the region of the country regarding the civil war or evolution.

Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way?

I also think critical thinking is VERY hard. Harder than people imagine. It is hard to teach, hard to deploy, hard to practice. I'm not sure even 20% of the population could muster the brain power required to sift through today's onslaught of zone-flooding garbage.

That's fair, it's certainly one of many hurdles that this sort of a solution would have to face.

Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way?

Well I'd probably answer that by starting out with an inquiry on how nihilism is a factor in what is a completely valid question about implementation? A school's ability to fund this kind of program from textbooks to technology to training staff and instructors has to be considered, this type of educational program doesn't happen in vacuum.

So I'd say you're right to ask questions about the disparity in school funding and how it would affect a media literacy curriculum-even if I'm not sure it's particularly accurate to describe such questions as "nihilist", they're completely necessary. But by no means am I intending to make any sort of value judgement about how successful this school or that school will be by merely suggesting taking a stab at introducing media literacy into public schooling.

To the questions of publishers, excellent question again. Maybe there are some models already out there worth exploring and iterating upon to maximize the value across the various school systems and school models (public, montessori, et al), a few people have commented that there are comparable programs where they live, I'd be curious to see if there are systems worth replicating in this thought experiment.

I think you raise excellent points here, all things said.

And from the children's side: It's already extremely hard to teach kids anything at a deeper level, especially those ones who will later on become susceptible to misinformation. If I look at my Facebook feed, schoolmates who got bad grades around age 10 are the ones sharing fake quiz results, horoscope stuff, "you won't believe what THIS person..." articles, listicles, racist stuff etc. Sure it's just correlational, but I think we don't have much better ways than we currently do in school.

If we could go back in time and design some critical thinking curriculum, are you sure you could teach something useful to those struggling 10-year-olds, that would keep their adult selves away from Internet bullshit?

Yes. That's why I made the suggestion to begin this thread with. What those 10-year-olds who grow-up to become adults (as we all do) do with that information is impossible to ever truly know, but I think something of value could be taught, yes, absolutely.

But I disagree that funding is a red-herring, no it's not solely about the money, but as I said: curriculum implementation does not happen in a vacuum. It's relevant, and I don't see many useful discussions about implementation specifically happening without it. If there's a discussion to be had about the ethics or merits of media literacy, sure money probably doesn't carry as much weight--but I'm trying to speak as broadly as possible on the topic to avoid the trappings of turtles-all-the-way-down kvetching about the stylistics over how the discussion is framed.

For example, we had something approximating it in Hungary, in history class. The very fist history lesson we had, was on historical sources, how historians work, "who benefits?", how you can know that a coin saying "minted in 350 BC" must be fake etc. And then later it was all facts and gospel, no critical presentation of different possibilities and interpretations and framings. Because it would be overwhelming.

But to actually train critical thinking, all classes should be redesigned in this manner, encouraging kids to poke holes in the material, but teachers can barely venture out of the confines of the curriculum. An elementary school physics teacher won't be able to explain things to you the same way a professor could if you raise some criticism or find a plothole in the simplified lie-to-children presentation. They'll just say, "that's how it is, memorize it".

It's a very difficult problem and hardly scalable.