Our information ecosystem, what is the way forward

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Welcome to one of the central challenges of our time, how can we maintain an internet which is free of expression at its core while also ensuring that the content being disseminated doesn't cause irreplaceable harm to our democracy, to our communities and to our physical and mental well being. Because we live in the information age yet the central currency upon which we all depend, information is no longer themed entirely trust worthy and at times can be dangerous. This times and part of the world with the growth of technology with social sharing platform allows us to scroll through where lies and fact sit side by side with non of the traditional signal of trust worthiness.

people are still obsessed with the phrase fake news despite the fact that it's extraordinary unhelpful and used to describe a number of things that are actually very different. Lies, rumors, conspiracy, propaganda and I really wish we could stop using a phrase that has been corrupted by politicians right around the world from the left and the right used as a weapon to attack the free and independent press. we need our professional news media now more than ever and besides most of these content doesn't even masquerade as news, its videos, reels, social post and most of it is not fake it's misleading. We tend to fixate on what's true or false but the biggest concern is actually the weaponization of context, because the most effective disinformation has always been That which has an atom of truth to it.


I would like to explain three main issues and three interlocking issues that makes this so complex and also some ways we can consider this challenges. First we just don't have a rational relationship to information we have an emotional one, its no just true that more facts will make everything okay because the algorithm that determines what context we see was design to reward our emotional responses and when were fearful over a simplified narrative, conspiratorial explanation and language that demonizes others is far more effective. Second, it can be perfectly legal to post an outright lie, but people keep talking about taking down problematic or harmful content without clear definition of what they mean by that, my concern is we have seen government move around the world issuing out hasty decision that might actually trigger more serious consequences when it comes to our speech

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Third, these companies Google, Facebook, twitter , whatsapp and Instagram are part of a wide information ecosystem which we would like to lay all of the blame on their feet but the truth is the mass media and elected people in government also play an equal role in amplifying rumors and conspiracy when they want to, as can we when try to post fake and misleading content. I know we all looking for easy fix but there just isn't one, any solutions will have to be held up at a massive scale, internet scale and yes the platform are used to operating at That level but can and should we allow them to fix these problems, they are certainly trying but most of us would agree that actually we don't want global corporations to be the guidance of truth and fairness of lie and I also think that the platforms would agree with that.


Let's also be clear that most of the changes we see only happens after journalist undertake investigation and find evidence of bias or content that breaks their communities guidelines,so yes these companies have to play a real important role in this process but they can't control it. So what about government, many people believe global regulation is our last hope in terms of cleaning up our information ecosystem but what I see are law makers who are struggling to keep up to date with the rapid changes in technology and worst they're working in dark because they don't have access to data to understand what's happening on these platforms. Anyways which government would we trust to do this, we need a global response not a national one, so the missing link is us it's those people who uses these technologies everyday, can we design a new infrastructure to support quality information, well I believe we can I have a few ideas of what we might actually do.


So firstly, if we are serious about bringing the public into this can we take some inspiration from Wikipedia. they have shown us what's possible yes it's not perfect but they demonstrated that with the right structure, with the global outlook and lots of lots of transparency you could build something that could earn the trust of most people, because we have to find a way to tap into the collective wisdom and experiences of all users. Can't we build a Wikipedia for trust, could we find a way that users could actually provide insight, they could offer insight around difficult content moderation decisions, they could provide feedback when platform decide that they want to roll out new changes.

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People experiences with information is personalized, my facebook news feed is very different from yours, your YouTube recommendations are very different from mine, that makes it very impossible for us to actually examine what information people are seeing. Can we build out a cognitive ambitious response one that matches the scale on a complexity of the problem, I really think we can, together let's rebuild our information ecosystem.

Inviting @bossj23 @saintkelvin17 @mesola and @missyleo to take a look at my post

THANK YOU FOR READING

with love 💕@emmaboy23