This is basically critical thinking. Which is also my goal for (optimal) education: To build a society of people who think for themselves, critical thinkers; those who do not take everything for granted. The skeptics.

See also Nassim Nicolas Taleb's advice to focus on what you DON'T know rather than what you DO know.

Related to syntopical reading/learning as well. (and Charlie Munger's advice). You want to build a complete picture with a broad understanding and nuanced before formulating an opinion.

Remove bias from your judgement (especially when it comes to people or civilizations) and instead base it on logic and deep understanding.

This also relates to (national, but even local) media... How do you know that what the media portrays about something or someone is correct? Don't take it for granted, especially if it is important, and do your own research. Validity of source is important; media is often opinionized and can contain a lot of misinformation.

See also Simone Weil's thoughts on media, especially where she says misinformation spread must be stopped. It is a vital need for the soul to be presented with (factual) truth.

• for: media bias - insight of journalist questions

• media insight

  • the journalist's question reveals where they are situated

• for: quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias,quote - future of democracy, quote - tilting elections, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
• quote
  • The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
  • At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
    • aggressive surveillance,
    • arbitrary suppression of content,
      • the censorship problem, and
    • the subtle manipulation of
      • thoughts,
      • behaviors,
      • votes,
      • purchases,
      • attitudes and
      • beliefs
    • are unchecked worldwide
• author: Robert Epstein
  • senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
• paraphrase
  • Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
    • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
    • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
      • biased search results,
      • biased search suggestions,
      • biased newsfeeds,
      • platform-generated targeted messages,
      • platform-engineered virality,
      • shadow-banning,
      • email suppression, etc.
  • Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
    • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.
• reference
  • seminar paper on monitoring systems, ‘Taming Big Tech -: https://is.gd/K4caTW.

• for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
• summary
  • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.

• for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
• paraphrase
• quote
  • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
    • http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/could-google-tilt-a-close-election/2013/03/29/c8d7f4e6-9587-11e2-b6f0-a5150a247b6a_story.html?ref=hackernoon.com
  • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
  • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
    • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
    • stats begin
    • search results favoring one candidate
    • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
    • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
    • stats end
    • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
    • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
    • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
    • stats begin
    • Google’s search engine 
      • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
    • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
    • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
      • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
    • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
    • stats end

This article explains the economic market. Creating 528,000 jobs is an outstanding aspect for the American people. But It also needs to explain the bad parts of creating jobs in this situation. Because challenging the rules of economics should not make a better situation, There are also high risks.

This article describes the disadvantages of high-interest rates. Although there are facts and parts that we need to be concerned about, high-interest rates also have advantages. There are more information about advantages about high-interest.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/

Good overview article of some of the psychology research behind misinformation in social media spaces including bots, AI, and the effects of cognitive bias.

Probably worth mining the story for the journal articles and collecting/reading them.

Popularity ≠ quality in social media.

Sean Phelan. (2021, November 26). Striking how some media coverage is assuming (without caveats) that the Belgian case brought the new variant “from” Egypt or Turkey.There’s no chance they picked it up after returning to Belgium of course. How could that happen..we only have a 7-day average of 17,000 cases a day [Tweet]. @seanphelan8. https://twitter.com/seanphelan8/status/1464252432033136659

Caulfield, T. (2021, October 18). The Golden Age of Junk Science Is Killing Us. Men’s Health. https://www.menshealth.com/health/a37910261/how-junk-science-and-misinformation-hurt-us/

Sutton, J. (2018). Health Communication Trolls and Bots Versus Public Health Agencies’ Trusted Voices. American Journal of Public Health, 108(10), 1281–1282. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304661

Mixing science and art to make the truth more interesting than lies. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://theconversation.com/mixing-science-and-art-to-make-the-truth-more-interesting-than-lies-100221?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bylinetwitterbutton

How to trash confidence in a COVID-19 vaccine: Brexit edition—Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. (n.d.). Retrieved August 10, 2021, from https://thebulletin.org/2021/08/how-to-trash-confidence-in-a-covid-19-vaccine-brexit-edition/#.YQwD9u6LazM.twitter

Hosseinmardi, H., Ghasemian, A., Clauset, A., Mobius, M., Rothschild, D. M., & Watts, D. J. (2021). Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(32), e2101967118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101967118

Holmes, N. P. (2021). I critiqued my past papers on social media—Here’s what I learnt. Nature, 595(7867), 333–333. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01879-y

Baghal, T. A., Wenz, A., Sloan, L., & Jessop, C. (2021). Linking Twitter and survey data: Asymmetry in quantity and its impact. EPJ Data Science, 10(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-021-00286-7

Agarwal, A. (2021). The Accidental Checkmate: Understanding the Intent behind sharing Misinformation on Social Media. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/kwu58

Young, K. S., Purves, K. L., Huebel, C., Davies, M., Thompson, K. N., Bristow, S., Krebs, G., Danese, A., Hirsch, C., Parsons, C. E., Vassos, E., Adey, B., Bright, S., Hegemann, L., Lee, Y. T., Kalsi, G., Monssen, D., Mundy, J., Peel, A., … Breen, G. (2021). Depression, anxiety and PTSD symptoms before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/sf7b6

Yang, K.-C., Pierri, F., Hui, P.-M., Axelrod, D., Torres-Lugo, C., Bryden, J., & Menczer, F. (2020). The COVID-19 Infodemic: Twitter versus Facebook. ArXiv:2012.09353 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09353

Identifying social media manipulation with OSoMe tools. (2020, August 11). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BMv0PrdVGs&feature=youtu.be

Grow, A., Perrotta, D., Del Fava, E., Cimentada, J., Rampazzo, F., Gil-Clavel, S., & Zagheni, E. (2020). Addressing Public Health Emergencies via Facebook Surveys: Advantages, Challenges, and Practical Considerations [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ez9pb

US, A. B., The Conversation. (n.d.). Coronavirus Responses Highlight How Humans Have Evolved to Dismiss Facts That Don’t Fit Their Worldview. Scientific American. Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coronavirus-responses-highlight-how-humans-have-evolved-to-dismiss-facts-that-dont-fit-their-worldview/

Cinelli, M., Morales, G. D. F., Galeazzi, A., Quattrociocchi, W., & Starnini, M. (2020). Echo Chambers on Social Media: A comparative analysis. ArXiv:2004.09603 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09603

Lakens, D. (2020). Pandemic researchers—Recruit your own best critics. Nature, 581(7807), 121–121. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01392-8

Smelter, T. J., & Calvillo, D. P. (2020). Pictures and repeated exposure increase perceived accuracy of news headlines. Applied Cognitive Psychology, acp.3684. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3684

The following text shows that people from the seven countries picked both by the U.S. Congress,Obama, and Trump do pose a significant risk of terrorism, despite the mainstream media's statements to the contrary.

Trump's temporary immigration ban from these seven countries was far from optimal, and may have actually caused considerably more harm than good, but it was not nearly as absurd at the mainstream media is propagandizing people to believe.

Check out this sketch from Saturday Night Live that mocks the news media for being uncritically in love with then candidate Barack Obama. There first and second questions for him are whether he is completely comfortable or if they can get anything for him.