Flytrap Roundtable Special: The FYP Won't Save Us
There's profit in AI slop, but more importantly, there's power in community.
Chrissy writes...
So, earlier in the fall I came across a couple of studies that shifted my perspective a bit on the problem of the disinformation and conspiracy theories that have fractured our shared reality severely since the 2016 U.S. election cycle, though of course the problem is older and has deeper historical roots. I grew up evangelical, doing "alternative facts" before it was cool, so I'm well aware of that. Social media technology has of course amped up the the speed, reach, and intensity of the dissemination of falsehoods, half-truths, and conspiracy theories, but I do find myself asking how much that tech itself is contributing to the decline of a shared consensus reality when the major legacy media are also gaslighting us hard in so many areas.
In one study, "On the Relationship between Age and Conspiracy Beliefs," Canadian political scientists Jean-Nicolas Bordeleau and Daniel Stockemer demonstrated a small disproportionate propensity among youth to believe conspiracy theories across the six countries they studied (the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, Germany, Australia, and Canada), which they attribute to youthful idealism, the potential for radicalization in online spaces and offline protest spaces, and political alienation caused by the lack of political leaders in their 20s and 30s—all of which I find a bit too pat, but I'll come back to that.
I decided to talk to some friends at The Flytrap to get their take on all of this, and the future of media literacy in a misinformation-riddled landscape.