
5000 upvotes, hundreds of comments, easy to verify, 100% wrong - canadianwriter
https://kolemcrae.com/upvotes-comments-wrong/
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tjwds
I think framing this as a technology problem, as quite a few folks tend to do,
is the wrong approach. There are plenty of nuggets of memetic knowledge that
are simply false, but still passed around by word of mouth (or, in some
extreme cases, by more systemic methods).

I hope a non-controversial example of this is the idea that vaccines cause
autism: patently false, spread through a million different mediums, easy to
disprove (if you look in the right places, as recommended in the article), yet
still a pervasive thought.

> This is a serious problem that we need to face online - a culture of fact
> checking needs to be pushed, even for small things like this.

It needs to happen everywhere, and it's not going to be a technological
answer.

~~~
canadianwriter
You're right - this isn't just an online problem though it is likely the
Internet speeds it up by a massive amount. A small false fact would be shared
in the past and with time become a meme (in the traditional sense) but online
it can happen in seconds.

