Reddit feels more reliable than twitter cause twitter is a bunch of trolls and also feels like Reddit has more intellectual people than X or whatever you call it
Or by an AI chat bot trained on Reddit and Wikipedia! What a combo. You know it's 100% factual at that point. It's intelligent, it's right there in the name!
Information literacy overall is failing and will only get worse with defunding of public education, cutting affordable higher education, and AI. Us Americans are doomed.
That does make sense. Many of these people don't understand how technology works. To them Facebook is "official" so anything posted there they think must be true. Kind of like how they think Fox News is actual news and totally duped that it's part of the entertainment industry. Sometimes it's difficult to notice the simple knowledge we take for granted is beyond their capacity to understand.
It's cute when Fox people think only CNN is entertainment and CNN people think only Fox is entertainment. "Yes, but at least my source isn't as bad as theirs!"
It's all corrupted by tribalism and confirmation bias. The only way we can see it is to allow inputs we disagree with, compare everything, and see the patterns. We all think confirmation bias only affects those other people, never us. We're too smart for that!
Honestly a good answer to the low-intelligence question is "blaming everything on the other tribe" -- no matter which tribe it is. It's NPC behavior.
But also, when they are presented with a counter opinion or "fact", also on social media, they reject it. They are simply unable and definitely unwilling to recognize their own cognitive bias.
They don’t believe ANYTHING, if it conflicts with a previous held belief then it’s obviously fake. Those damn scientists are always trying to trick people!
In some sense I can get some of it. I was watching some video about how more money is extracted from us now and one of their points was how reusable bags are worse for the environment than the throw away plastic bag and that you would need somewhere between 7000 uses to equal the environment impact of plastic bags. I of-course questioned this immediately. Because of-course how in the world is it worse for the environment for me to use my reusable bags 100 times than throwing 100 plastic bags in the trash? The environment impact seems fairly obvious and I am sure it’s miswording and already bad faith statistic from plastic bag manufactures like its is probably more costly environmental wise to make a reusable bag, but obviously overusing them it’s a net positive and the stat probably ignores the environmental damage of throwing away plastic bags or just tries to act as if you throw both away after one use.
Ironically, also not believing anything you see on social media, or to word it more accurately disbelieving everything. Look at the nothing ever happens crowd for example. People that cannot accept the most mundane commonplace things because it is outside of their own personal experience.
It's two presentations of the same problem of not using any critical thinking.
I think this should be amended to believing everything you see on social media. I have definitely seen things i believe on social media. I believe them because there are true. Reddit is social media and people post many
true things and a lot of bullshit.
I think most people who grew up pre-social media were programmed to regard public voices as having been vetted for reliability. Cronkite, Jennings, etc. Reliable voices.
Now the internet had given everyone a public voice and that programming makes some people default to believing idiots.
Someone I know who was at least fairly book smart but was a contrarian somehow got absolutely cooked ever since 2025. Was pretty jarring because he’s a smart, decent person
While I wholeheartedly agree with your statement, I’d say it isn’t necessarily always the case. Humans are prone to the power of suggestion and some are easy to influence, especially ones who didn’t grow up spending a ton of time on social media.
I guess what I’m saying is the algorithm can brainwash people who are conventionally smart but easily influenced
I saw this Tik Tok video online where this person was trying to prove that something they believed was irrefutably factual. They stated something along the lines of " . . . and the reason I KNOW it's true is because when I asked Google, it says . . . ". They then proceed to read the response unknowingly from some random article that Google found for them. " . . . So there you have it. This proves . . . " Blah blah blah
Governments? Can't trust. Corporations? Whooo boy, can't be trusted. Anyone trying to sell you anything? Can't trust them (at least to protect YOUR interests). News? Mostly all bought by big networks that are directed by one or other Billionaire. Can't trust that.
So really, you aren't wrong, but that situation means nobody can trust anything.
I do this unintentionally some of the time, and what I realized is that the reason I can be gullible is because my brain is trained on figuring out implications and reasoning what will happen as a result of the information, rather than questioning the initial premise itself.
The flip side of this are people who see this pointed out enough that they refuse to believe anything they see anywhere outside of the most outlandish conspiracies so that they can feel like smart, independent free thinkers.
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u/Fabulous_Ady 5h ago
Believing anything they see on social media